


These Violent Delights

by touchstoneaf



Series: Something Wicked [2]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Adult Language, Anal Sex, Angst and Humor, AtS episode rewrite, BDSM, Bondage, Claiming Bites, Crossover, Don't copy to another site, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Ensemble - Freeform, Established Relationship, F/F, F/M, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Rape Recovery, Sex Toys, Surprise Pairing, Undisclosed relationship - Freeform, Violence, addiction metaphor (magicks), and a lot of Season 4, details of brain surgery and recovery, institutionalization memories, justice for just about everybody!, polyamory Xanya, season 5 rewrite
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:20:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 43
Words: 462,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23782255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/touchstoneaf/pseuds/touchstoneaf
Summary: Part 2 of"Something Wicked"series(S5, beginning with "Buffy vs Dracula")Spuffy have been together for a while now.  Things have been great.  The Scoobies have more or less accepted the reality of their couplehood, Spike finally has his own place, so there’s plenty of thoroughly excellent shag-time, and college is kind of fun when you have a worldly, undead tutor to poke fun at your instructors and help you remember your lessons with fascinating anecdotes or, when that fails, incredibly memorable sexy-times.  Life is actually, like, bordering on good.But then Mr. Eurovamp 2000 blows into town and causes a bunch of jealousy.  And then Buffy starts having a bunch of crappy Slayer dreams about glowy purply stuff.  And Dawn is going off the hook even more than usual, and Mom is acting weird…  And, as if there’s not enough to deal with, Buffy’s pretty sure that idiot Riley Finn is still lurking around town trying to come up with a reason to shoot her boyfriend…Buffy should have known things couldn’t stay yummy for long.  She probably would have started to worry if it had.
Relationships: Angel/Cordelia Chase, Angel/Darla, Anya Jenkins/Other(s), Faith Lehane/Other(s), Joyce Summers/Other(s), Rupert Giles/Ethan Rayne, Rupert Giles/Olivia, Spike/Buffy Summers, Tara Maclay/Willow Rosenberg, Xander Harris/Anya Jenkins
Series: Something Wicked [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1671157
Comments: 71
Kudos: 119





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wolf_shadoe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolf_shadoe/gifts).



> **Story Notes:** This is fic is a completely unintentional sequel to “Cry Havoc, and Let Slip Your Heart”, because apparently I wasn’t done with these kids yet after I’d already spent so much time with them. I wanted to know how they’d get on in S5, I guess. Heck, I wanted to know how they’d finish off S4. I wanted to play more with Joyce and Anya, and I hadn’t gotten to play with Tara yet, and I don’t get to do that post-series. Hell. I just wanted more. 
> 
> Hence, all my motivations for this fic were not specifically plot-driven, and it might be noticeable. Ah well. Who needs a reason to do a rewrite, huh? Hopefully it’s still fun and I come up with one or two unique things, or at least find a couple of fun angles. 
> 
> RE Content Warnings: some of my tags are more just to be on the safe side. Many are questionable and up for interpretation. Like, I consider some of the things that happened in Buffy's family prior to Sunnydale to have been abusive, but that depends on how you view things. The "character death" is technical, canonical, and swiftly reversed. There are memories/aftermath of stuff from the previous story, and of past vampire crap, which still counts, I guess. There. Covered my butt.
> 
>  **Formatting Note:** For anyone who’s never read me before, I do a weird thing. Or, at least, it’s weird nowadays. I use an old fanfic convention from long ago because I'm ancient, and we didn't used to have access to italics in the days when I used to fic. Can't break the habit now, I'm just too old and it looks weird for me without it. Character thoughts look like this in my stories: /Blah blah blah./
> 
>  **Disclaimer:** All characters property of Joss Whedon, damn his brilliant, confusing soul. And Mutant Enemy. And apparently some people at, I guess, Fox, now? (Who can even keep track anymore. I’m still half-stuck in the WB/CW/UPN confusion.) All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners, yadda and blah. (OCs if any are MINE, ALL MINE!) I am in no way associated with Joss, Mutant Enemy, UPN, Fox, or any other media franchise. I intend no infringement. I intend sexy shenanigans and JUSTICE FOR SPUFFY!
> 
>  **Pairing(s):** Um, Spuffy. Always Spuffy; ESTABLISHED RELATIONSHIP STYLE, YO! Tillow with mention of Willow/Oz, of course; a sort of mutant version of Xanya; some Ripper/Rayne stuff, and a lot of friendships that normally don’t get explored. I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone do a Joyce-Anya friendship. Just sayin’. (Oh, and there won't be Spoyce, but Spike flirts his ass off at Joyce when she's not momming him half to death.)
> 
>  **Rating:** Oh, ya know. Mature. With props (ie BDSM. And anal and stuff like that, so if that’s not your tub, don’t bring your bath toys). But done right this time; with sexy consent. Along with mucho discussions about past events that did not have sexy consent, so let that be a warning for you. I don’t pull punches. This story follows a really rough one that had some terrible rape stuff, so there’s healing bubbling up in here, aftermath-y stuff (for which I warn). Mostly though… it’s fun stuff.
> 
>  **Author’s Note / Dedication:** Gotta dedicate this one to the wonderful and amazing wolf_shadoe, for being the most enthusiastic and dedicated beta ever. Everyone, send wolf_shadoe love for making sure the “Something Wicked” series became a thing!!! You make a person feel damned good about a story, you. And you’re fun to talk at, to boot!!!
> 
>  **Special Thanks (as always) To:** to OffYourBird, for rescuing me from the wilds of the internet and bringing me to my new online home at Elysian Fields. 
> 
> PREFACE:
> 
> The first chapter of this sucker is long AF, so you're getting what amounts to two chapters for the price of one to start this baby off, because we need to catch up on ALL of the remainder of S4 and to barrel right into the beginning of S5, so we can get current. 
> 
> WOOT, let's get this train on the track!  
> VIOLENT DELIGHTS, pulling out of the station!!!!

This demon was  _ not _ friendly. 

It was also not really very visible. Which made it both a good and an irritating way for Buffy to work off her current annoyance. /You may not be easy to see, but you’re a useful demon./  _ Grunt, swing. Stab. _

_ Miss. _

Typical.

She was off her game tonight. Well, technically, she had been off her game for a few days now, but that was what happened when a Slayer was doing more fighting with her vampire beau than she was with the demons she was actually supposed to be tussling with. It distracted, and was a waste of energy, and made her want to give beat-downs in the wrong places, and…

Her head rocked back as the transparent thing she was fighting got a good punch in edgewise; a very sharp one, filled with talons like broken shards of glass.

/ _Dammit!_ /

Stilling herself, quietening even her breath, Buffy went old-school. Listened through the low, moaning whuffle of the Santa Anas flowing around her, caressing her skin with warmth… and heard a faint swish on the grass to her immediate left. Her  _ uncovered _ left. Swung out with her off-elbow… and caught the whatever-it-was in the face or throat or something.

There was a  _ thud _ as it went down hard. 

Whirling, she swung downward, no time to lose, and gave it a whack with her sword. Saw the faint ripple in the grass that indicated what might have been edges. Heard a weird cracking noise, like a shattering window, and a faint, sharp cry, then silence. 

“Ugh.” Her cheek was dripping blood onto her shoulder. “What the hell  _ were _ you, anyway?”

Her head jerked up when a slow-clap rang out across the cemetery. /Oh, you bastard./ 

Swinging down off of the nearest crypt-top where he had been sitting, apparently nonchalantly dangling his feet to watch the show, Spike landed with casual competence and came up from his panther’s crouch to approach. Standing at her elbow but with slightly more space between them than was standard, he peered down at the invisible monster in the grass. Scuffed at the spot for a moment, then shook his head. “I’ll get it, pet.” And bending, he grasped… something. Lifted. 

His shoulder seemed to ripple a little, but that was it. 

“Wh…”

Straightening, his eyes bored into hers. “Wouldn’t want some poor tosser to come here in the daylight and trip on the bloody thing, innit?” he pointed out, and tilted his head in the direction of the open grave she had passed on the way in, probably dug for the next fledge she’d have to stake tomorrow night. 

They walked in strained silence till they gained the edges of raw earth. With a low grunt of effort, Spike hefted the thing in. It fell with a  _ whoosh _ and a crystalline rattle as it hit bottom. “There. ‘Magine they’ll just toss a bit more dirt in to hide it from the mourners, lower the casket, and call it good. No doubt the sods around here are used to lookin’ the other way, yeah?” But as if to be helpful, he kicked a few clods in over the edge from the pile of dirt left behind by the backhoe.

They rattled down along… something inside the dark pit. Some of them seemed to hover without quite touching the bottom. “You know that probably made it worse, right?” Buffy pointed out blandly. Which was probably bitchy of her, since it was damned nice to have help with the cleanup nowadays, especially when she was tired from a night of slaying, and definitely when she was wounded. It made it easier to get home or back to school quick and get some sleep before the day started all over again, which was still relatively new for her. 

Or, well, sometimes it made it easier. Sometimes it was just a means to a quickie. Or had been, till recently. All the better to make time so they could make time and all that. Except there hadn’t been any sex in four days. Not post-slayage. Not at all. Not even any more angry, possessive sex. Just, nothing.

Spike hadn’t even tried to do anything about the gouges in her face, which was totally unlike him. 

Instead, he shrugged and turned away, heading for the crypt he had recently begun to renovate here at Restfield. “Willful ignorance is bliss,” he pointed out, and poked inside his duster for his cigarettes. 

They fell into a silence that was somehow both comfortable and mildly awkward, and dammit, couldn’t he just admit it wasn’t her fault so they could move on?

Everything had been going so damned well, for months, before that idiot Dracula had shown up in town. For one thing, there had been no official capital-A Apocalypse last year, which in and of itself had been weird as hell, and definitely a first in Buffy’s experience. By far a first for her tenure here. Not that things had been in any way uneventful. First, there had been a frustratingly sexless family Christmas, replete with Spike being a ridiculous puppy over his inclusion in the festivities (Mom got him a dark blue sweater that matched his eyes and made them glow and which, okay, made Buffy drag him outside for a serious makeout session when he promptly wore it to please ‘mum’). 

Needless to say, the school break was also replete with a whole hell of a lot of snuggling and petting, and during the above event, one extremely chilly tryst on the back porch that might have turned into full-on wall-sex if Mom hadn’t been literally right on the other side, in the kitchen, baking something or whatever. 

Unfortunately it was also full to the brim with Giles climbing right up Buffy’s butt at every opportunity about her not-quite-promise to look deeper into that whole First-Slayer inheritance thing with that what-was-her-name, Sineya, but that was slow going. A lot of the stuff on her was in some African language—Yoruba or something?—and was really tough. Giles did a lot of shepherding Buffy through the meditations; and yes, she was willing, because she truly did want to get to the bottom of her very primitive connection with Spike on an apparently demon-y level… but it was tough to concentrate on stuff like that when said demon-y level (and every one of her human-y levels, to boot) was mostly focused at that moment on getting her vamp alone behind some corner on any available flat surface for some far more physical meditations. As such, she'd made a lot less progress than Giles had really hoped for before school became a thing again. “Sorry, Giles. I’ll keep on it whenever I don’t have homework, I swear.” /And probably make a lot more progress once I get really, really laid./

Between Mom, Giles, and holiday family-time, Christmas break from school had flown by with hardly any moments alone. Then, immediately after all the snuggly family fa-la-la-ing, there was a very small mini-apocalypse-earthquake thing—which had, by the way, totally gotten in the way of attempt number whatever at getting down while they had actual voices. A) crypts and stuff falling on people during earthquakes actually got distracting, eventually. B) Buffy had been way too freaked by the concept of possible world-endage to focus after that. 

Spike had been not only understanding but all gung-ho to go out with her and beat up the stupid jerks out to end everything for the nth time, and had helped her stop the ritual by virtue of a nice slaughterfest down around the hellmouth, because why not have more killing-in-lieu-of-actual-sex.

They had, of course, given the dorm another shot after that, since things were pretty dead in there over the break. But unfortunately that didn’t work out even a little bit, because though Willow was gone a lot lately doing all-night study things, she didn’t go home for the break, instead staying on campus over vacation... and she still got a little wigged if she came back and found them doing what Spike called ‘canoodling’. She had made that pretty clear during the whole ‘mass laryngitis’ episode of things by doing a very succinct impression of ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ and making ew-faces at them while hiding half behind the door. It all made for some very tense attempts at sex that ultimately went nowhere, and Buffy was starting to seriously rethink her concerns about public venues when it came to carnal acts. Which, if she was being real with herself, every time Spike whispered sweet, dirty, encouraging nothings in her ear in places like the Bronze, was starting to look not just vaguely possible but even maybe… um, a little bit attractive? Like, in a ‘maybe I’m even developing a  _ thing _ for this concept’ kind of way. Which was bad, bad, bad, but she was starting to have a tough time not thinking about it a  _ lot _ of late, and they really needed to get to the sex in appropriate places before she cracked.

Thank god they’d gotten Spike’s chip out, because without sparring, they’d both have died of sexual frustration. Probably Buffy’s would have strangled her in her sleep. However. Sparring had eventually started to make it worse, what with the hard, fast, wonderful trial of it, and the laughing and dodging and no-holds-barred  _ thrill _ of it, and…

The thing was, she had kind of forgotten how freaking sexily fast Spike was. And the way he could, like, grab her and whirl her and hold her from behind, around the neck… Which move, for the record, was a lot more effective when you kind of wanted it. When you kind of wanted the ‘dip in for the kill', crazed vamp-tinglies, ‘danger-danger!’ portion of festivities, because when his mouth landed it was all cool, seductive lips and nibbling teeth that totally mistranslated that old message from ‘I’m gonna die, he’s gonna eat me’ to something more along the lines of ‘dear god, please eat me I’ve never felt so alive as here on the edge of not-death’. Which was kind of them all over, and somehow she was supposed to  _ not _ climb him like ivy up a slim, cool, inviting tree, and a graveyard was just fine, wasn’t it?

Well, except for the other vampires and assorted demons who kept showing up to comment on proceedings and vamp-shame Spike for trying to get it on with the Slayer. Because everyone needed a dose of peer-pressure and guilting in their daily ration these days, and you know what? 

Nowhere was sacred or helpful, and could Mom maybe just go on a buying trip or something? 

Then, hallelujah, she actually had, a week or so into January. An after-Christmas miracle. Praise Santa.

Which was, of course, when that jerk Ethan Rayne had come back around and turned Giles into a pointy-shouldered demon like those ones who’d gotten out of the Initiative. Because it was pretty clear at this point that if the universe wasn’t conspiring against Buffy getting back to home plate—and along about then she was kind of over Spike’s insistence that they had to round third first—it was making a serious case for Spike getting an apartment, or a warehouse, or a cave. “I don’t care,” she’d told him in mindless, frothing frustration. “A cardboard box on the marina!”

“Flammable, those, love,” he’d answered, chuckling and adjusting her clothes. So much fooling around with plenty of orgasms, sure, but no damn follow-through, and she was  _ done _ . Three weeks done. Over-done. Toast.  _ Burnt  _ toast. 

Would it really be so bad to let him go down on her behind the Bronze or something so they could get this show on the road? /Did I just  _ think _ that?/

/Does the DeSoto count as being in public? Because I’m sure I can convince him it’s roomy enough if I just get all seductive. Feel your power, Buffy./

Luckily for both Giles and Buffy’s libido, that whole ‘turned into a demon’ thing had actually not gone so badly, nor had it taken very long to unravel, courtesy of Spike, who somehow understood the language (something to do with having once had Fyarl minions or something. Buffy really didn’t want to ask too many questions). He had helped convince everyone that their friend and Watcher was really just this dude trapped in a demon’s body so they could go after the real bad guy. Which episode had somewhat endeared Spike to Giles, who had been in kind of a bad way. 

Unfortunately, Giles had picked sort of a rotten moment to start things off, since the reason Spike had had a chance to hear him talk in Fyarl was because her Watcher had chosen the worst possible time to come up into Buffy’s house to try to convince Buffy he was himself. Basically, just when… well. Buffy had sort of kind of been in bed with Spike along about then, since Mom had  _ finally _ gone out of town for a day or two, thank  _ god _ , and after the better part of three days Buffy had finally worn Spike down enough to forget he’d made ‘that lovely woman’ all those extravagant promises about platonic blahdy-blah while under her roof. As such, they had been trying, right at that apparently very inconvenient moment to see if their relationship should, you know, move very firmly in that direction, posthaste. Which had contributed to Giles' super bad evening, since Spike had basically been buried in Buffy’s neck with his hands in  _ places _ when he’d showed up in her bedroom doorway. 

Things had actually turned around for Giles right about then, though he hadn’t known it yet. Probably he’d thought the world was crashing down around his ears. 

Spike had shoved the howling ‘demon’ aside with a curse, so hard that Giles had staggered against Buffy’s bedroom doorway, and gone right on back to what he had been doing—“Spike, I have a demon to fight, would you stop!” “It’s alright, luv, I’ve dealt with Fyarls before. They’re dumb as posts. Dangerous, sure, but it’ll take a mo’ for the thing to recollect itself and rush us, and I was busy.” Nuzzle, nuzzle—only to pull away in stunned amazement when the demon had shrieked something and come roaring in again, claws bared to try to swipe the amorous vampire from Buffy’s body. 

Disengaging from his very important task, Spike had stiff-armed the thing and stared. “Oh, surely not.”

Another bunch of incomprehensible roars.

“Oh, for God’s sake, man, I wasn’t going to bite her! You ought to know better than that by now; or at least to know the girl better than that, yeah?” A smug grin, and Buffy had at this point been utterly nonplussed by the way Spike had been acting. “Though, as to what I did intend, if she was willing…”

Another bloodcurdling snarl.

“Oh, bloody hell, keep your knickers on.” Spike’s free hand had slid up into his hair, and he’d glanced over at half-naked Buffy. “Romantic interlude’s over for the mo’, obviously. Sorry, pet.”

“Um, obviously! What the heck…”

Spike had had a weird, contemplative look on his face, though, his eyes studying the demon in a total once-over. Almost clinical. “So, when did you turn into a Fyarl, anyway? Just come over all demon-y this morning when you woke up, is it?” And to Buffy’s everlasting startlement he’d actually released the now quiescent demon—though to be fair the thing was actually looking kind of hangdog—rolled away from her, sat, held out a hand for her to pull her upright (at which point the demon apparently got shy? Anyway, it had started looking everywhere but at her in her bra)… and then reached into his jeans for his lighter.

Okay, that was it. “One, you.  _ No _ . No smoking in my bedroom.  _ Definitely _ not in my bed. Two; you. Fyarl or whatever. Who the heck are you, and why does Spike know you?”

Eventually they got the whole Fyarl-Giles thing ‘sorted’, as Spike put it. Buffy had turned very, very red, hurriedly put her shirt back on, and decided that she would die of embarrassment as soon as this was all over, because awkward, much, having one’s father-figure walk in on the whole partly-naked-and-about-to-get-it-on-fest?

Fyarl-Giles had seemed as grateful as she had been to proceed directly to the task of collaring Ethan Rayne—do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, definitely do not ever talk about what had just occurred—with only Spike apparently amused at everyone’s discomfiture.

Luckily there had been this whole high-speed chase thing involved in the middle to break the ice, between the DeSoto and the cops, with Spike grinning over the wheel and squeezing Buffy’s thigh in clear, almost sexual enthusiasm while the huge Giles-beast hunched over on the other side of the cab looking both hunted and unwillingly aroused by the experience. After that there had been a wildly unsettling one-sided (to Buffy) conversation between Spike and the be-demoned Watcher about demon-y urges, one which Buffy had had to interrupt to ask Giles, sweetly, if he hadn’t expected this, since he’d been ‘ridden’ by a demon once or twice before as a young Ripper. 

Giles hadn’t liked that much, muttered something that Spike had later informed her (he had recounted the whole convo to her, actually, much to her discomfort) was something along the lines of his having tried to forget about being a demon’s pony. Which, ew. 

Then he’d lumbered out of the DeSoto to chase down a cop who had recently given him a parking ticket, to scare him. Which was kind of totally un-Gilesy behavior… but also kind of impulsive and teenager-y, and Buffy had had to try really hard not to laugh.

As soon as she realized her Watcher-beast wasn’t going to eat the guy, anyway. 

Spike’s restraining hand on her thigh had tightened when she’d been about to dart out to stop him. “He’s just blowin’ off steam, pet. Lot of crazed urges an’ energy runnin’ through him right now, yeah? Tough to control it all, at first. Takes years of practice…” He’d shot her a very intense look. “Even after a hundred-plus, isn’t an exact science.” And he’d lit up a cigarette and turned away to blow smoke out of his open car window. 

Everything about his demeanor had made her shiver in anticipation, and why in god’s name did stuff like that turn her on? Was she really that big on flirting with danger?

She’d asked Spike that later, in bed, after they’d chased Ethan out of town—again—while her vampire stroked one hand slowly up and down her leg, urging her back to the place they had been in before all this. “I think, luv… you spend your life flirting with death and danger. After that, after livin’ on an adrenaline high, vanilla shite and human lads… just aren’t gonna get you off. It’s just not in the cards for you.”

It had hurt to hear it. But… it was real.

They had gotten it on,  _ finally;  _ which, boy howdy, by the way, with that whole if human guys hadn’t gotten her hot or gotten her off, vampires sure the hell did. And in comparison to the first time, she hated to say it, because it sounded super disloyal, but… Just,  _ damn.  _ Happy birthday to Buffy, a little early and often, and many thanks to Spike for the best birthday she had had in recent memory! 

Much ‘practicing’ had ensued thereafter, in every available locale and very much to the detriment of college and Slayer homework; and for the life of her, Buffy couldn’t find it in herself to care. She learned very quickly that there were actually very many extremely inventive ways to turn Spike’s favorite activity into a vertical sport if you just got creative. And he was endlessly creative, now that he had gotten his original ‘need time to do this right’ thing out of the way. The main problem was actually getting him to stop long enough to give her a turn, because she wanted to learn, dammit!

Only a couple of weeks into the ensuing sextravaganza… Faith screwed everything up when she woke up from her coma. And took over Buffy’s body, and her life. 

For, like, a minute. Spike had walked in on Faith and Mom, gotten an earful of the other Slayer’s attempts to seduce him using Buffy’s bod, frowned, asked her, “Buffy, what the bloody hell’s going on, you alright?” and had, according to Mom (who was being  _ held hostage _ at that moment by her ex-sister), glanced over at the woman sitting tense on the bed, gotten a whiff of all the anxiety and anger on the air, frowned, turned, cupped Faith-as-Buffy's face, looked into her eyes… and backed away. “Joyce, you okay?”

“No. Actually, Spike, I’m not. That’s  _ not _ Buffy.”

“Yeah. Did notice that.”

Which was apparently when Faith had attacked him. 

She’d had no chance. Faith was a damn good fighter, sure. But she was in a body she wasn’t used to, and had been in a coma. The reflexes were a little off when it came to brain-body communication. Meanwhile Spike, well-fed, chip-less and sparring daily with a Slayer, the vampire who had spent a hundred years battling Slayers as a hobby… 

Eventually Faith had fled. Right into Buffy, who had arrived right in that moment to clash with her, in Faith’s body, in her front doorway.

The subsequent shouting-match between the Scoobies and Spike, Mom, et al over who was who had been kind of epic, taking place as it had while the two of them had thrown down in the front yard. It was a good thing Spike had been there to bear witness, since Buffy had had her hands totally full. At one point Faith got Buffy down for a sec, at which point she'd absolutely lost her shit and tried to beat the hell out of her own face while screaming things like, "You're disgusting! You're worthless!" Just absolutely freaking to the point she was almost hysterical, which was... kinda sad?   
  
Seeing that, who knew what might've happened if Spike hadn't been there. Luckily, Giles had been convinced enough—mostly because he had enough confidence in Spike’s savvy by then, after the recent Fyarl-support business—to be willing to take his testimony on… well, faith. They’d bundled the two Slayers into the house and hidden them in the basement till the Council’s ‘wetworks’ team had gone elsewhere in their search, then between them chained up the damaged Slayer and found the reversal spell to put them back in their right bodies. 

All’s well that ended well and all that crap.

Buffy had been all for sending Faith off with those wetworks guys. It had actually been Spike, of all people, who had suggested the Angel thing. “Not sayin’ I’m a big fan of my grandsire, Buffy; but if they’ve done some talkin’ over it in the past… The bastard does know a thing or two about gettin’ over his issues, dealin’ with regret an’ the like. Should ask him to take her on. He’ll do it; consider the project a soddin’ penance.”

Buffy had frowned fitfully. “He’ll probably sleep with her.”

That comment had earned her a narrow glare. “Who the bloody hell cares if he does?”

She had glared back. /Oh, are we really gonna play jealous-guy now?/ “The girl who’ll have to go stake him or try to stuff his stupid soul back in so he doesn’t go tear-assing around LA torturing everyone as Angelus! Or did you forget what happened the  _ last _ time he got a happy? Because I  _ can’t _ !”

Spike had managed the feat of both looking inordinately relieved and rolling his eyes at her as if she were an idiot all at the same time. “Oh, for fucksake, Slayer, that wasn’t about him getting off! It was because you were a sweet, innocent sodding virgin, yeah? Which this one’s not; not by any stretch, so if they play with each other, no harm no foul!" 

She’d gaped at him, her world whirling. “It wasn’t because… of the sex?”

He’d scoffed. “You think the poof loses the bloody thing every time he tosses off? That he hasn’t got himself shagged in the last hundred soddin’ years since he left us? S’ not like he knew about the bloody curse then, yeah? He shagged Darla enough soddin’ times after, no trouble.” He’d narrowed his eyes pointedly at her. "You think he hasn’t been desperate enough to go pay for a back-alley blowie since?”

/Oh./ She’d flinched, because no way had she thought of that. Not even a little. And ugh; did he have to make it sound so  _ sordid? _ “What, you think it has to be a… mutual…”

He’d snorted derisively. “Dunno how mutual anything can be with a virgin, ‘less he was better in bed than I imagine he was. Which, based on personal experience, and what I saw over twenty years watchin’ him shag Dru, was no doubt real soddin’ short on foreplay.” He’d actually sneered. “Though I s’pose there’s always room for improvement since.”   
  
She’d flinched again and looked away to study the ground between her feet, both because she really wished she had never heard the words 'personal experience' in that sentence—she'd known, but she still didn't want to _know—and_ because even now, based on recent personal experiences of her own, she still felt kind of crappy admitting that Spike was really pretty damn right in his assessment. 

So, fine. There was a difference, and she could separate the two now. But couldn’t he, like, give her a second to absorb the realization that orgasms were not, in fact, synonymous with ‘perfect happiness’, and sex was not, therefore, synonymous with shame, evil, and death? After all, it completely threw the entire narrative Angel had fed her under the bus. /Not that I didn’t kind of figure that out since, but I’m kind of really happy when I have them, so, you know…   
  
/But I guess… we could probably have found ways to get around that little roadblock. If we were enough. But he just made it sound so impossible, like he was too scared to try. Like he didn’t want it, or.../

“B’sides," Spike had ground inexorably on, "he’s not in love with the bloody bint, so…”

Still reeling, Buffy had looked away. “Well, either way, it wouldn’t be good for her. He’s supposed to be helping her.”

“Well, maybe he’ll be a good boy and keep his prick in his pants, yeah?”

Angel had arrived within a few hours to knock at Mom's door, and was waiting when Buffy opened it. Buffy had felt him there, knew who it was, and taken a deep breath on the other side of the closed portal before she’d admitted him. Back in her own body, she had been overly aware of every bruise, scrape, kink, and raw place on her misused form, and also way aware of the vamp-buzz on her skin at fore and aft. Despite the fact that she knew neither vampire would ever hurt her—at least, as long as the one in front was in his current frame of mind—she’d felt kind of… flanked in that moment, overwhelmed, and had shivered a little at the sense of being plunged deeply into a roiling spa of vampirical sensation. “Jeez, that’s a bit much,” she’d breathed. It had been a bit much with Spike and Drusilla before, too, but Drusilla had felt… off. Weaker, till she was at full-strength again. Then it was either Drusilla along with Angelus’ weird-ass vibe, or Spike and Drusilla, but seldom both guys at once in close proximity. Not since that one night with Spike and Angel in the Cabinet, with Spike spouting off about the true nature of love. /Which... talk about food for thought, now./ 

She had forgotten, though, how overwhelming it could be to be so close to the both of them at once. 

Bad enough that there was about to be some kind of jealous vampire showdown—which there would be, inevitably—but to also have to deal with this level of distracting-ness while she kept the two Aurelians from jumping on each other was a bit much. “Behave yourself,” she’d reminded Spike as she’d set her hand on the doorknob.

“I will if he will,” Spike had answered shortly. “He already knows I’m here, though.”

“God, this is gonna be so bad,” Buffy had whispered to herself, and opened the door. “Hey, Angel. Thank you for coming…”

Angel had stood on the front porch, framed in the doorway and straining to burst in right past her surprise disinvite. When he’d spoken, his reaction had been predictably… colorful. “Buffy! What is  _ Spike _ doing in there? And why can’t I…”

“Got an invitation, Peaches… which is more than I can say for you.” Leaning back theatrically, Spike had posed himself on the stairs against his flared-out duster, and smirked. “How you been, Granddad? Haven’t seen you since that spot of torture in LA.”

/And here we go./ “About that…”

“Not gonna say I’m sorry about it, Buffy.” The response had come out short, tight, and fierce from where Spike reclined, one elbow cocked back on a step behind him to eye his grandsire in amused condescension. Every line of his being, though he might have tried to deny it, hummed with tension and a ferocious need to defend self, territory, and a barely-held breastwork of ego, and oookay, this was so not going to be pretty.

Buffy had turned back to her ex, fighting to remember how very little this really had to do with yours truly. /It’s not really about me, it’s not really about me/ had been the mantra of the day. “I’m sorry about the disinvite, Angel. It was… just to hold you back long enough to get you to listen, and I wish I didn’t have to do it.”

His eyes had jerked to meet hers, dark and hurt and stunned out of their dark blaze of hatred. “Buffy, what…”

“Spike’s inside because things have changed. He lives here right now.” If Angel’s eyes were bulging at that, the next part was really going to hurt. “Um, we’re, involved now?”

Angel had stopped straining forward and gone briefly limp to stare at her as if she had gone completely insane. “You’re… Buffy, did… How…” To her distant amusement his eyes had narrowed to shoot over her shoulder to Spike. “You don’t have thrall," he'd raged, low and furious. "I’d’ve known if Dru taught you.” Buffy's amusement at the ludicrous accusation had fled when they had come back to promptly flicker to her neck. “Did… Did he…”

/Did he what? Bite me? What the hell difference would it make if he had?/ 

Behind Buffy’s back, she could hear Spike’s low, warning snarl. “She’s not mine, Peaches, I’m hers.”

“Okay, what?”

“Because unlike some avaricious bastards, I don’t take without askin’ first, and I sure the bloody hell would tell the girl what I was takin’ before I took it. Full soddin’ disclosure, yeah?”

Something inside Angel had seemed to relax. “Then you’re still my girl, right, Buffy? This is just… You’ve got to be under some kind of spell, or…”

Behind her, Spike had snorted. “No, that’s long gone. This is the real thing, Angelus.”

“The name’s Angel,  _ Spike,” _ Angel had retorted grimly, but kept his eyes on Buffy, demanding the answer to his old, prodding question.

Buffy had closed her eyes as the pull dragged at her; the automatic drag to respond, automatically and with urgent loyalty, that she was, in fact, ‘his girl’. But something in the back of her mind had fought, struggling against it. Something old, something fierce, something abruptly more than a little angry, and heading toward outraged. Her nostrils had flared, and she could have sworn in that moment that she could smell, or sense, or feel Spike at her back; a reminder of all they had recently cast off. A reminder that she was powerful in more ways than she had ever thought of before. 

And something broke inside her. Something that wanted free. Something that had been chained. “I belong to me,” she had heard herself whisper, and pulled herself upright. It had sounded… liberating. “I belong to me.” A little louder, this time; a realization, maybe a revelation.

She had opened her eyes, met Angel’s incredulous stare with ferocious, powerful certitude. “I belong to  _ me!” _

Angel had actually staggered back away from the door, as if the denial of her old, reflexive reassurance had been a blow. “Buffy!” he’d whispered, sounding dumbfounded.

“She’s not yours, Angel,” Spike had intoned then, and came to his feet behind her to have her back. “Think you heard her right enough. Which means you don’t get a bloody say who she dates, who she claims, who she sleeps with, any of it. Now. You gonna be civil and do as she’s asked, help out with the other bird as actually needs you, or are you gonna turn tail and run because you lost this one?”

“I…”

Buffy hadn’t been at all sure what was even happening, except there seemed to be more going on here than just words. That the words that were being used had heavier meanings than the surface definitions; that they maybe carried some kind of supernatural weight, even. She’d felt like shaking her head, as if to clear it from some kind of muzzy, hanging curtain of clearing, leftover haze. /I don’t have time for… whatever this is./ “Angel. Make your choice.” 

She’d used to feel like she had all the time in the world to indulge her ex-boyfriend’s mysterious looks, his puppy-dog eyes, his dramatic expressions, but in that moment his wounded expression had seemed strangely irritating. The whole meeting was kind of grating on her. “Do you care about what happens to Faith, or not? Because either she goes with you and has her shot at redemption, or those wetworks guys from the Council will eventually grab her, and I’m pretty sure, based on what Giles has said about them, that they’ll completely ruin her; or what’s left of her. I’d like to think Spike’s right, and she can be saved. I mean, I’m not a huge fan of the way she came in here and attacked my mom and tried to seduce him in my body, but that’s kind of Faith for you, and maybe…” It sucked to admit it, but it was true. “Maybe she’s gone through some really bad things we don’t even know about that have messed her up so bad that she feels like she can never come back from it. And I’d like to think that’s not true. For anybody.” 

Spike’s words would echo in her mind forever; spoken to her the night prior, when she had been ready to strangle her sister-Slayer and have done with it, for putting hands on her mother and her guy.  _ “Have my suspicions about her, pet. About what might’ve happened to her, young. About what happens to people to make ‘em think they’ve no worth, and that there’s no savin’ ‘em. Give her a chance to have someone who feels the same way tell her she can come back, yeah? That there’s still somethin’ to life. Let her try. She needs to believe she’s worth somethin’.” _

Just the thought that Faith might have gone through… Not that it would be surprising. Buffy had told Spike she knew she had been luckier than most. Honestly, why she hadn’t thought of it before was beyond her, considering how Faith acted around guys, and about sex, and about everything; like nothing mattered anymore. /This world sucks./ And it wasn’t like it was Faith’s fault. /But she would believe it was. And then she’d believe what happened down by the docks was her fault; that it was because she’s wrong. Bad to the bone. Because she’s never lied to herself like I always did, about our dark side. And then when someone came and offered to take her out of that craphole of a motel and give her a place to live; someone who was nice to her but didn’t try to…/

All the sudden, very belatedly, Buffy had been able to see what had attracted her sister to working for someone even as venal as the Mayor. It hadn’t been about being evil. Not really. It was about belonging, being cared for… and thinking she had nowhere else to go anyway. /Both because we never gave her anywhere to really fit in, and because she already thought she was the worst. Oh, man./ “You tried to help her once, Angel, but everything kind of got in the way. I think she’d listen to you. I think you can help her. I think you might be the only one who can.” /Especially if sex doesn’t get involved, and I hope to God it doesn’t, for Faith’s sake./ “So tell me now; are you in, or are you out?”

Angel had stared at her, briefly speechless, then nodded slowly. “I’ll help her Buffy. But you. I can’t just leave knowing you’re… here. With him. Like this. I can’t… believe that you’re okay, when…”

To Buffy’s shock, Spike had nodded and stepped right outside the door, past the barrier. And thrust his hand up in Angel’s startled face. “Let’s find out.”

Angel went instantly into game face. “I will put you  _ down _ , boyo.”

Spike had set himself, spreading his legs, and kept his hand in place. “Go ahead and try. I’ve learned a thing or two since the last time you did. And any road, that’s not what I meant. Go ahead, if you have the guts.”

“Oh my God, you guys, will you please not? I don’t want you two…”

“Leave it, Buffy.” It was snapped out, short and sharp, stunning Buffy with the rudeness of it. Since when did Spike ever talk to her like that? 

His hand was still in Angel’s face, his expression aggressive and uncompromising. “Do it. Unless you don’t wanna, because you’re afraid it’ll confirm everything.”

Angel had growled, low and brutal in the yellow-eyed silence… then to Buffy’s disconcerted amazement he’d seized Spike’s hand. Spike went promptly to game face as Angel’s fangs sank into the meaty edge of his palm. “Oh my God,  _ what _ …”

And then Angel’s expression had changed from vicious anger to startled denial. His tongue had flickered out in an absent, unconscious move to seal the punctures, and he'd dropped Spike’s palm, half throwing it away from him and half dropping it in disbelief.  _ “No! _ How? She wouldn’t…”

“It wasn’t like that,” Spike had answered, lisping through his fangs. “It happened a bit backward, but it did. I was broken. Bleeding. She took me on. I pledged to her. She accepted me by holding me in her blood. She named me hers. I’ll never raise my hand to her, so you can bloody well toddle off and not worry, yeah?”

Angel’s game face had faded out as if it had never been, leaving behind bewildered chocolate eyes to stare at her over Spike’s leather-clad shoulder, as astounded as if she had shot him through the heart with a flaming crossbow of death. “Do you have any idea what you’ve  _ done _ , Buffy?” he’d breathed.

She hadn’t been at all sure, though she was for damn sure resolved to ask Spike later what the hell that had all been about. At the moment, however, she had known enough to answer, “Spike’s mine, and that’s all you need to know, Angel. Now, can I let you in without you having a big tantrum, or do I have to keep the barrier over the door?”

For the first time since he had decided to leave her last year, after he’d bitten her, Angel looked utterly defeated. He’d closed his eyes, and his shoulders slumped. “Fine. Yeah. I guess… I’ll take Faith and head back. I’ll do what I can for her, if she’ll even stay with me; which is debatable after how things ended with us the last time. And you can…” He’d shaken his head once, in sharp negation. “Go ahead and invite me in, Buffy. I’ll play nice.” Buffy didn’t think she had ever heard him sound so weary.

Faith had still been unconscious from the shots with which Giles was plying her when Angel had picked her up and, with a slight caress to her cheek that had belied his large frame, carried her to his car and handcuffed her to the door with the shackles that had once been used on Dome, the Hellion biker. (Those chains had, by that point, seen a lot of use lately, between Spike and the Hellion and now Faith.) Before he’d left, though, he’d eyed Buffy and Spike sourly. “If this thing… goes bad, Buffy, give me a call. I’ll be here in a second to back you up. I know how to handle Spike.”

Buffy had had to fight to roll her eyes. “I have your number.” Wow. Had Angel always sounded so… So self-important? /Like I can’t handle myself if Spike suddenly loses his mind and attacks me or whatever./ 

It was really weird to think of Angel that way. To think of him in any way uncharitably. It made her wonder why she was doing so now, when she had once had endless wells of patience for his shenanigans. It was just… for some reason she was feeling kind of exasperated with him now. She had never felt that way before. It was bizarre.

“Not bizarre, pet,” Spike had told her later, holding her hands in his and kneeling before her while she sat on the couch and fought to swallow the uncomfortable realization that she had been had. “It’s just tough to think negatively on someone who’s got a blood-leash on you, yeah?” And there was a depth of lived understanding in his tones as he said it.

“So… you’re saying that when he bit me…” She’d shaken her head; unconscious negation. “No! He was half out of his mind with fever. He was just feeding, to stay alive! He wouldn’t have had time for an ulterior motive, and he never said  _ anything! _ You say there has to be some…  _ words…” _

“He growl?”

“What?” She could still hear Angel, in her ear, ferocious and terrifying and, okay strangely attractive, she could admit to herself now, to the part of her mind that came out to play around Spike; the part that thrilled to danger and the wild. 

The part that had been kind of okay with how very damned much it had hurt, and…

Spike had looked away. “Did you come, Buffy?”

She’d bitten her lip and avoided his eyes. She had never told anyone that. Because it had hurt so very damned badly, and no one was supposed to come from something like that, and so she had tried to forget it. Because it should have been easy to forget something that had happened then, on the fading edges of consciousness; and because she had been dying.  _ Dying!  _ And it was like getting off from being raped or something, even if she had asked him to do it, and it was so confusing that she… That she’d gotten off in the end from this incredibly painful act that was killing her, because it meant that maybe she could  _ like _ pain and…

“It’s not your fault, pet. It’s a primitive thing. Part of the package. Not always like that, anyway. And bound to happen, when someone claims you. Which doesn’t necessarily require… words in English, or any other human language, for that matter. He’ll have said it in… a way that made sense to the demon, did he want to keep you. And it would’ve been enough that your… body acquiesced, in that moment, to give him a bit of a hold. Which it would’ve done, yeah, since you’d given yourself to him before then. It was familiar. Your brain knew him, wanted him. And then, every time after that he used that leverage to get you to accept the claim in words, it got stronger, even if you didn’t accept it in words during…”

She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t. “So I can’t… He…”

“Not anymore. You told him you weren’t his. You broke it.” A cool hand, rising to touch her cheek, to stroke away the hot tear that had gotten away from her. “I’m so sorry pet. I suspected, but I didn’t realize it was like that for you. I thought you’d have accepted it outright, the way you were with him, or I’d’ve…” His voice was shaking now, and she heard the note of restrained fury beneath it. “Yours to do, I know, if you ever wanna stake him for it, or take his sodding head, but if you ever want help…” A tiny tremor of his hand on hers as it dropped to cup her fists in her lap. “Know what it’s like, is all. To have him… take advantage. Of your need to be loved by him. To be wanted. And then to have that… violence, instead. To be owned but not… held.”

She’d closed her eyes, trembling. Because that was what it had been. Angel had kept her, but never held her. Instead he had walked away, and that was… “Can you take me to bed, Spike? Please?”

“Yeah. I can do that.” And he had, and to hell with house rules. Mom had been away at the gallery. And, well, they’d already broken the rules anyway, while she had been gone, and what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, and Buffy had needed to know that she was held by someone who wouldn’t hurt her, and wouldn’t leave. 

Spike, it turned out, knew all about that, and for the same reasons.

From then on out, Buffy did not call or speak to Angel Investigations, and they got all their 411 about Faith and her progress via reports through the Willow-to-Cordelia grapevine.

Things settled down for a while after that craziness, and Spike and Buffy had a very nice period of what he liked to call ‘crypt-shopping’. He finally found one he liked way out at Restfield, which was pretty far from Revello, but kind of nice in that it was sort of equidistant between the college and Willy’s, which made it a good in-between spot. “It’s no apartment, but… it’s kinda you. I have one problem with it.”

“Yeah, pet?”

She’d grinned at him and launched herself to wrap her body around his waist. “No bed. And no shower…”

“Thought you said one…”

She’d covered his mouth with her hand. “And no toilet. For when I’m gonna stay here all night…” And she'd nipped his neck. 

“I’ll fix it up proper…” he’d managed around her vicious kissing assault. 

Such a damned relief to think of him living at his own place. “You’d better. If I’m gonna have enormous amounts of sex with you…”

He’d had her against the nearest wall in a trice, and damn the ambiance. “Could still get a flat, but this is cheaper…”

A hand in his hair had forestalled any further discussion, drawing his head back till his eyes met hers. “I’m tired of waiting. This is fine. Great. Fuck me now and we’ll call it ours.” 

“Whatever you say, Slayer.” It had become liberating to say certain things right out, with him. And the way he responded…

_ God. _

She’d helped him move in, lending muscle when he’d needed it. Even helped him with some of his interior decorating choices. The crypt had a lower level, because of course it did. Everything in Sunnydale had a lower level. That was where the place shone. Upstairs was reserved for pirated electricity from over by the caretaker’s shack, courtesy of a lot of carefully-hidden extension cords; TV, fridge for the blood, that kind of thing. They scrounged a loveseat for him, with Willy’s help; just enough room for two to snuggle under the old afghan Mom gave him from his room at the house. ‘Downstairs’, though, was where they went all-out. Real bed—if you could call a box-spring and mattress slung over a couple of old sarcophagi a bed—two nightstands, a dresser, a record stand and player—yes, a record player, for reals—and about a half-million candles. 

Talk about making love in some seriously romantic—if a tiny bit goth—environs. 

Buffy was not going to ask him where he got the sexy, silk-blend sheets, either. Whenever she asked him where he acquired stuff, he usually told her he won them or ‘the dosh’ to buy them in a poker game; and to be fair, the one time she sat in on a game, he did amazingly well. He traded kittens for cash after at some bizarre demon-run kittens-for-cash pawn shop (and wouldn’t let her sneak in to release the poor babies afterward, warning her that she would upset the entire underground economy if she did and that the whole population of fuzzballs would likely starve to death on the streets in three days) and was flush for a while afterward, so who knew. Maybe he did live off the proceeds. 

Things were stupid-quiet for a couple of months. They nested. Buffy did school stuff and kept an eye peeled for Initiative agents who might try to shoot her vampire when no one was looking. They fought fledges and the occasional demon with a grudge. Mostly they sparred with each other and had a ton of sex. Spike helped her with her homework, without admitting in the slightest that he knew what he was talking about when he looked over her essays, or held forth in long diatribes about the ‘absolute tosh’ they were teaching in her European History class.

Buffy honestly wasn’t sure when she had ever been this happy. Some other shoe was bound to drop soon, right? Any time. When, a few months later the thing happened with Jonathan, it had been kind of a letdown. After all, as baddies went, her ex-classmate was just plain ridiculous. 

Spike’s admiration of her, his glowing, unadulterated worship of her as his One, had seen her through the torment of those few incredibly weird, grating, humiliating days playing second fiddle to a pint-sized playboy. 

With Spike, she was always the A-number one Slayer. 

Also, he wasn’t sleeping with Jonathan, which was pretty okay in her book. Though he had made a few comments in passing that had made her realize that, if properly motivated, her vampire could possibly swing both ways. That little adventure in mind-control had given them fodder for some very interesting and amusing conversations, and led to not a few walks down memory lane for him, and, well. Those broadened her horizons some, it must be said. 

Once the subject was broached, by the way, Spike was just overflowing with observations. Like, he seemed pretty adamant that something was going on between Willow and some girl, which, just, what? “Tellin’ you, pet. She smells of some other bird. Chit’s all over her. And not just in the friendly way. Smells of sex.” He’d smirked, pulling at his cigarette. “‘M thinkin’ Red’s learned the glories of a bit of battin’ for the other team, as you yanks like to put it. An’ more power to her, finally gettin’ over wolfboy.” He’d grinned broadly. “Bet she’s gettin’ a right education about now.”

Buffy had been utterly floored. “I just… Are you  _ sure?” _

“Pretty bloody well sure.”

“It’s just… I mean, I would’ve said there’s no way, before.” Except… there was all that stuff Wil had been saying lately about how she understood now why Buffy had hidden away with Spike at the motel, and how, ‘Maybe I drove you to hiding from yourself. Maybe I helped you feel like you had to hide something from all of us that you can’t change, about who you’re attracted to. And that was… maybe uber-wrong of me. Maybe I should’ve asked more questions. Maybe I should’ve listened better… or even just given you more room to talk. I’m sorry, Buffy.’

Buffy had been way thrown by that unexpectedly candid offering—not to mention that, at the time, it had felt sort of out of the blue—but now faint memory assaulted Buffy; of Willow, just after having met her vampire doppelganger, all unsettled and weirded out, freaking about how her vamp half had been ‘skanky… and kinda gay’; and how Angel had almost corrected Buffy when she had reassured Wil that who the demon was had nothing to do with who the human was, but had cut himself off before saying much. Which, knowing what she knew now… 

/Oh my God, and she’s basically never at the dorm anymore, and all those late nights ‘studying’ with her… her Wicca friend…/ “Oh. Oh, wow.” 

And then pain had assailed her; a sort of ache of loss. /When did we…/

Spike, of course, had read her instantaneously. “What’s wrong, love?”

She had fought to shake it off. Failed. “It’s just… If she was going through something so big… why wouldn’t she  _ tell _ me?” /Especially if she thought I might actually  _ get _ it, now, with the whole vamp thing, and…/

Spike’s fingers, gliding through her hair. “Would you have told her about me, if we’d started differently? Or would you have hidden me away?”

Buffy had closed her eyes, because the idea that Willow might fear retroactive shaming in her own turn for who she was attracted to just made it worse. “You think she’s… ashamed, or that she thinks I’ll… That we’ll  _ judge _ her, or…”

“Dunno, pet, but maybe make a few noises in her general direction that you’re okay with that sort of thing, and she’ll no doubt come around.”

Commence operation ‘make Willow feel comfortable in her bi-ness’. In which Buffy had probably gone a little bit overboard, she had thrown herself so totally into it—whenever Wil was actually in their dorm or around at all—but the final results were that Wil had finally smiled shyly at her one day over coffee at the Grotto and said, “So… I guess you know?”

Buffy had tried to play ignorant. “Know what, Wil?” /Bury yourself in your coffee. Let her come out or whatever./ That was what the literature they were handing out at that one stand over at the Commons said to do. 

Wil’s small smile was somehow both secretive and strangely more grown-up than Buffy had ever seen on her friend before. “How did you even figure it out? Did you see us somewhere and notice how we acted, or was it… something else? Something I said by accident, or the new musical tastes? Because that Lilith Faire CD is so not a dead giveaway. Or…”

Buffy bit her lip. “Wil, I…”

Wil had sighed, and the little smile had fled. “I saw the pamphlet under your books on your desk, Buffy. And okay, I’m totally touched that you, like, did research on how to support me, but that’s kind of…”

Buffy had blushed. “Well, you weren’t talking about it, so I…”

“Okay, that’s fair, but…” Now Wil looked seriously confused. “Seriously, though; how  _ did _ you figure it out? I mean, just me being gone a lot ‘studying’ doesn’t scream ‘suddenly doing gay things’, right? Did you actually  _ follow _ …”

“Oh God no!” Buffy had wondered, though, if Wil might actually think her answer was worse. Things were rocky enough with the whole ‘Project Accept Spike’ without weirding out Willow, who was like the least unsupportive of the bunch, despite the fact that she’d been through some serious stalkage with the whole Angel/Angelus thing, and literally been kidnapped by Spike once. Like, she was actually being open-minded, if cautiously so, and the idea of freaking her out at this early stage was of the suck, but… “Um… if I said it wasn’t me who figured it out, would you be mad?”

Willow looked askance.

/Might as well just tell her./ “Okay, so… don’t think this is super weird, but Spike kind of smelled her on you? It’s a vamp thing? And he told me it wasn’t a ‘friend’ smell, if you get what I mean? So he kind of hinted that there might be a reason you were spending a lot of time away, and then I felt bad that I wasn’t paying attention, so I…”

“Oh Goddess…” Wil looked way embarrassed. 

“It wasn’t him being skeezy, I swear. It was a totally ‘him telling me so I could be a better friend’ thing, I promise…”

It had been a really long time since she had seen Willow hide her face in her hands. 

“Are you okay?” 

Nothing. “I promise to try to make sure he only ever uses his powers for good?”

Wil peeped out from between two fingers, glared a little. “You so should get on that. Omygod.” But she did finally exit, her face still pretty much totally magenta. “It was bad enough that Faith picked up on it right away…”

Buffy had sat up straight at that.  _ “Faith _ did?”

“Yeah, that’s what…” She had shaken her head. “Never mind. Long story.”

/Yeah, it must be./

Making a face, Wil had sat back and looked kind of at a loss. Buried her face in her cup and taken a long swig in that ‘buying time for equanimity-recovery’ way. When she emerged, she faced Buffy squarely. “Are you freaked? Or mad, or…”

“No.” Buffy had looked down and away a little, at her cup. “Sad, maybe? That you felt like you couldn’t tell me? Because it feels like we’re, you know, growing apart. And I know I’ve been super-involved with the Spike thing like I was with the Angel thing, but I don’t mean to not be there, or be a bad friend, or…”

“Oh, Goddess,  _ no _ , Buffy! You’re  _ so _ available! You’ve been bending over backward to tell me you are! It’s just…” Will had shaken her head, clearly at a loss. “You have slaying, and I have… this. The Wicca thing, and her, and it’s… mine. I kind of wanted it to be this powerful thing I had all to myself, that I didn’t have to share with the whole group for a while, I guess.” She had actually sounded a little sad to have that over.

“Oh.” Buffy got that. She really got that. Sometimes she kind of wished she didn’t have to share the thing with Spike. That it could be just them, with no one watching them and making silent bets—or not so silent, in Xander’s case—as to when it might go wrong, or… Or it might go totally the other direction. Xander was still having trouble with Anya, was fighting to try to prove to her that they could maybe get back together. Which meant that he might be weird about Willow not telling him that she had a new person, and maybe he might even be flipped out that said person was a girl. Considering how Buffy felt about Wil’s not trusting her with such big news, Xander might feel even more hurt, being as how they’d been friends since, like kindergarten. Or, he might conceivably do the guy thing where he got all weird and turned on about the two girls thing, who knew. 

For sure Anya, who still hung around the group, if on the periphery whether she was dating Xander or not, would make odd comments about sexuality. Buffy could totally see why Wil would want to keep things to herself for a while. “I’m not going to say anything, you know. That’s totally on you, when you wanna do that.” She reached out, covered Wil’s hand. “I just wanna know one thing. No, wait,” she amended. “Two things.”

Wil’s eyes rose, hope filling them again, turning them from stormy gray back to blue. “What?”

“That you’re happy…”

The tentative expression turned upside-down, tremulous… became a bright, almost giddy smile. “Buffy, Goddess, yeah. I’m  _ so _ happy.”

“Good. Then I’m happy for you.” And she really was. It was so great, such a total relief to see her bestie look so blissful after so many months of being basically sunk in melancholy. If this girl could make her happy-Wil again, then she was automatically in the club. /Whoever is good for my Wil is good for the world. End of story./

After a moment of basking together in that reflected joy, Wil sniffled, looked down at the table. “What… was the other thing?”

“Huh?”

“You said you had two things.”

“Oh.” Buffy had grinned, poking a light finger at the wrist under her hand. “What’s her name, you doofus.”

“Oh.” Wil had blushed. “Tara.” And the blush had deepened to something so rich that Buffy didn’t even need to ask the next one. 

She did anyway. “Do I get a bonus question?”

“Oh jeez!” Wil had groaned. “Are you gonna…”

Watching Wil explode was adorkable. And completely the definition of that ‘turnabout is fair play’ thing. “Okay, you totally pried when I started having sex with Spike…”

“Okay, I did! But this…” She sounded about to hyperventilate.

“Is only fair. I’m guessing it’s good, or else you wouldn’t be turning fuchsia right now. But, like, on a scale of, you know…”

Wil snatched up her coffee cup and buried her face in it once more, trying to hide. “That’s totally not fair, Buffy! I’ve been with two people! Two!”

/And I’ve been with two one-night stands and Spike, so spill./ “And?”

Wil had mumbled something incomprehensible into the cup in which the words ‘not fair to Oz’ could be heard over the Styrofoam lip.

Buffy felt herself grinning. “So what I’m hearing is, while Oz was very good, sometimes it can be an advantage to have the same parts, so you know your way around…”

“I am going to run out of here and never come back to our room,  _ ever _ again, if you don’t. Shut. Up…”

Buffy had laughed out loud, but stopped before Willow could spontaneously combust right in front of her. “Someday we’ll have to compare notes. Spike might be a lesbian in a guy’s body…”

The almost-change-of-subject had brought Wil out of hiding. “What do you…”

“Sometimes getting him to stop what he’s doing and head north to the main event takes serious convincing. Not that I’m complaining or anything.”

“Oh. Well. I mean, that’s just… Always a good thing.” Wil’s alarming color began to subside. 

“Yes, yes it is.”

“I’m… going to run away now.”

Buffy had managed to sober up enough to catch her best friend’s attention. “Hey. Are we good?”

“Oh.” Wil’s gaze had cleared, and she had exhaled shakily, nodded. And her whole being had relaxed. “Yeah. Much with the good.” And then she’d narrowed her eyes. “But you’re really gonna have to not embarrass the crap out of me when you finally meet Tara, or I’ll have to kill you.” Getting up, she’d seized her cup and turned away. Whirled back. “And tell your irritating vampire guy same rule applies, and that I know more spells that would… I dunno. De-love him if he doesn’t behave himself, or…”

Buffy swiftly held up one hand. “I’ll make him behave.”

“Good.” 

“Hey,” Buffy had murmured as Wil had moved to depart. “I love you, Wil.”

Wil had turned back, still a little awkward but also glowing. “I love you back, Buffy.”

Spike’s newfound openness with discussing everyone’s bisexuality hadn’t stopped with Willow. And, okay. Sometimes Buffy had had to shut him up, because on occasion the subject matter had been way outside the bounds of TMI. Like, he also apparently seemed to think that Giles and Ethan Rayne had once been an item, which was just… Ew, much?

“Oh, don’t tell me you missed it, Slayer. Their body language alone was…”

“Okay, just stop. Seriously. Wil is one thing, but I  _ can’t _ with bisexual Giles. I definitely can’t with bisexual  _ my _ -age-Giles who used to screw his demon-summoning bestie while doing orgies…”

Spike had grinned irrepressibly. “You did say there was only one bird in that group, yeah? And if there were orgies…”

“I’m seriously begging you to stop, Spike.” He was making  _ way _ too much sense, and she had never thought of that, and she really, really wished she could  _ unthink _ it now.

“Ought to ask him sometime what was the exact origin of this ‘Ripper’ business. Like, was he ripping off people’s togs, or was it something more dastardly…”

“Oh my God,  _ please _ stop.”

The jerk vampire had paused for a moment, as if considering something. “He’s not the only one, you know.”

“Only one who what?”

“Who plays for both teams.”

“Yeah. Wil. You, apparently…”

“Your girl Faith…”

“Wait,  _ what?” _

“Chit’s in love with you.”

_ “Excuse _ me?”

“Ought to know what it looks like to be mad for you and all twisted up over it, yeah? Reason she stole your life, wants to shag the men you’ve had. Likes bein’ where you’ve been. Next best thing if you can’t have the girl, to have what she’s had, stand where she’s been, smell it, bathe in it, taste it…”

“Spike,” Buffy had told him very certainly, “you’ve lost your damn mind. You’re certifiable. Faith  _ hates _ me…”

“Can’t have hate without havin’ love first. Both come from great passion. If you didn’t have that, all you’d end up with is indifference. Chit’s anything but indifferent to you, pet. She’s soddin’ obsessed. If she can’t have you, she’ll  _ be _ you. Anything but herself, since she’s apparently so bleedin’ unlovable that you can’t even look at her…”

“You know what? This is definitely a conversation I can’t deal with right now.”

Spike had eyed her with interest. “So, no high school experimentation, is what I’m hearin’.”

“I  _ will _ punch you.”

He’d grinned broadly. “Well, at least we know you didn’t lead the poor bird on.”

“I’m serious. I will  _ dust _ you if you don’t shut up.”

“Gettin’ to be a hollow threat, luv.”

She’d narrowed her eyes and pulled out the big guns. Anything to end this highly uncomfortable conversation. “Okay, fine. I was too focused on Angel to notice any of this so-called Faith thing. Which I still don’t believe was happening, by the way.”

A low, resigned half-growl answered her sally. “Fine, then. Won’t sodding bring it up anymore. But it’s bloody well true, for all of that.”

“Quit while you’re ahead, William.”

He had. Problem was, once the cat was out of the stupid bag, she couldn’t stop thinking about it and wondering, replaying past stuff. Like most of the incisive crap he said. 

Eventually she had to lock it up in the back of her mind in the sinking cask labeled ‘Faith’, alongside a lot of other dark, heavily-chained ones, like the ‘Angelus’ cask, and the one involving memories of a certain rainy night in the vicinity of her seventeenth birthday, since, well. It wasn’t like she could do anything about past events and people who weren’t around her anymore anyway. And Faith had no bearing on her current reality, so why deal?

Damn vampire.  
  


Spike and his insights were actually really amazing, though, when it came to things that should have been super obvious and really weren’t sometimes. Like, Jonathan had probably only done what he had—no matter how oogy—because he was lonely and wanted to be loved, have friends. Which made total sense, considering the thing with the gun at school, and… 

And Buffy had reached out a couple of times, after, on Spike’s instigation. And, okay, it turned out that the guy was decently good at summoning, which was a thing you kind of wanted to keep close to the core if you were running Slayer-central, and not have running around loose… Which meant that he could also read Latin, Sumerian, and Babylonian, which, um, wow? Like, this thing he’d done was no dabbling accident; he was serious demonology boy. Also, and more importantly, he was just a little spell-worker deluxe.

After a little fast-talking about redemption and keeping good magicks-users from going bad without supervision, she had talked ‘Ripper’ and Wil into taking the guy under their wing. Which, after the first suspicion had worn off, even Xander had been happy about it. “It’s… actually kind of cool to have another guy in the Scoobies, finally. I mean, I know he’s, like, on parole here and stuff, but still.” 

Buffy had no idea why Xander didn’t think Giles and Spike counted as ‘guys’, unless it was more about Giles being old and Spike being not his type, because basically, no one knew who he thought he was kidding playing things all cool. Xan and Jonathan spent like ninety percent of their time just straight up nerding out over crap. It was scary. Anya practically had to tear them apart like they were a couple. It was actually starting to be a problem—as in an ‘exactly how many bi people are there in this bunch?’ kind of problem—because it was clear that Anya was jealous. Like, good thing she couldn’t do vengeance anymore, minorly screwing up the group dynamic kind of a problem. Not that Buffy was super hung up on the whole completely ambivalent, will-they-won’t-they Xander-Anya relationship or anything, and she wasn’t entirely sure what Anya and Xander even were, but as long as they were, you know, screwing—which she was pretty sure they were again since Xander had stopped mouthing off about demons every five seconds—Buffy agreed hardcore with Spike’s assessment that he needed to chill and ‘attend to his chit before she took his head off’. 

Things were getting tense as hell at every Scooby meeting. Or, at least they were until Spike had pulled Xander off to one side and had a man-to-man with him about it. Which could have gone over like a lead balloon, since at that point Xander still mostly eyed Spike like a viper slithering around the room and made unwilling, under-the-breath comments about his nasty presence at every opportunity. Probably he wouldn’t have listened to a single word the vampire had had to say about his fraught not-a-relationship, since he was also kind of defensive about the whole thing… except Spike had that way about him of cutting right to the bone with a single word. He’d probably said something like, ‘You’re losing your bird, with this whole man-crush you have goin’ with superstar-boy. You should tone it down a bit. You have a good thing goin’, there. Anya’s a real catch.’ 

Yeah, Buffy could basically predict by now what her guy would say in any given situation. She also knew that he really liked Anya. Which, to be fair, made sense, since Anya was, like, the only other one of them who got what it was like to hang with a bunch of humans and try to get past a lifetime of demoning around. They ‘grokked’, as Xan put it, on this whole other level. They were bros. Which pissed Xander off and made him suspicious kind of in the same way that Anya was about Xan and Jonathan, and he would have been defensive at first about the interference… but it must have worked eventually. Things quickly went back to an even keel after that little convo. He spent more time with Anya, spread things out a little more evenly with his fellow geek, let Wil have more time nerding around with Jonathan over books full of ancient languages; which worked, because Wil and Jonathan could seriously delve into texts. 

In that period they also found out, completely by accident, that  _ Spike _ could read said ancient languages. He had been leaning over their shoulders one morning while they were working on translating some scrap of something found between the pages of a book full of Greek or whatever. “We’re not getting anywhere,” Wil had said in disgust, and moved to push it away. 

Jonathan had grabbed it away from her. “Look, though. I  _ told _ you, it looks like Hebrew, but that little thing in there is just gibberish, or some demon language I don’t know, or… I mean it looks a little like Sumerian phonetically, but…”

Spike had been tensing more and more as they had gone back and forth over the same ground, over and over. If Buffy was reading him right, he looked frustrated, about to explode about something, though for the life of her she couldn’t figure out why.

Then suddenly he broke, voice taut with irritation. “That’s because it’s not Hebrew,” he had informed them in a tone that would sound casual to anyone but Buffy. To her it sounded tense, irritated. “It’s square-script Aramaic with bits of Old Aramaic script stirred in to drive you mad; and that bit you can’t figure all wodged in the middle there is an older sort of cypher in Phoenician.” 

The second the words had left his mouth he had gone exceptionally still, as if belatedly catching himself, bit his tongue, and gone po-faced.

Of course, by then they were all staring. Giles, lowering a book to peer over it, glasses dangling off the end of his nose. Xander, head lifting from over his own tome, half-eaten jelly donut held forgotten in his hand. Wil and Jonathan both lifted away from the scrap to turn their heads and stare over their shoulders. Buffy, who had been leaning back against a bookshelf sharpening a sword, had frozen in amazement. 

“Y… You read Aramaic?” Willow had demanded, sounding floored.

Spike’s face had hardened, and he’d turned away. “Didn’t mean to interrupt. You go on about your research. Got to help the Slayer sharpen things. Great load of weapons to prep for patrollin’ about tonight…”

Buffy had narrowed her eyes at him, watched the line of his body. He was hiding something. She was sure of it. 

Anya, leaning against Xander’s shoulder and previously looking bored, now looked interested. “How many did you collect over the years? I myself have about twenty, but I’ve lived a lot longer than you… and to be fair, Middle Aramaic was actually spoken, still, in some places when I was alive, which is more than can be said for a vampire who is barely a hundred and twenty. A hundred and, I imagine, forty or fifty, counting your human life. This must be some holdover from your previous existence.” She’d tilted her head to study him with interest. “Did you have some sort of scholarly background, Spike?”

Giles’ book had snapped closed with a loud  _ whump _ . “Not according to his Council bio… but I’m starting to think that might have been a load of waffle.”

Spike didn’t say a word. He just strode over to station himself at Buffy’s side. Picked up a nicked short-axe and a whetstone and began sharpening the broad, gleaming curve, looking mulish.

Giles had frowned a little, and then very abruptly snapped out some phrase in some language that Buffy thought she vaguely recognized as Ancient Greek. 

Spike winced so hard that Buffy felt it run through his whole body. It was like he couldn’t help himself; and wow. /You totally understood that, didn’t you?/

Her lover had completely been hiding this whole other side of himself. 

Buffy had found herself staring at him in shock. And she hadn’t been the only one. The whole room was focused on her vampire now. 

After the shortest pause, however, he had gone on calmly sharpening things. 

Giles was not about to let it go, however. He had stalked closer, with an air about him of a leonine creature singling out a prey animal and preparing to pounce. And rattled off something in Latin. 

Spike had actually shuddered. 

“Ugh,” Wil had called from over the back of her chair. “I could be wrong, but I think that you did that verb-conjugation all wiggy…”

Eyes focused steadfastly on Spike’s stubbornly downturned face, Giles’ expression had taken on a determined, almost vindictive cast. “I did.” And then he’d said something again, the escaping syllables clipped, hard. 

Spike’s eyes had shot up to meet the Watcher’s, burning, agonized… and pleading. “For Chrissake, man, will you bloody stop that? You’re actually causing me pain, here.”

Giles’ expression had gone unbelievably triumphant. “I  _ knew _ it! You great, lying git.”

/Wait. What?/

Spike had sighed and lowered the axe. And looked, in that moment, totally embarrassed. “Alright, but it doesn’t go with the image, yeah? Just, for God’s sake, don’t do it again. I swear to Christ I could feel the tawse every time you muffed a verb. Was like I was bein’ birched all over again…”

The light in Giles’ eyes went startled. “Where?” he demanded. And then he’d straightened in something like shock. “Don’t tell me…” he’d breathed, sounding stunned.

Then Spike had done something that had floored every single one of them. He spoke. “My friend, I doubt very much I should have to explicate any further, as it seems to me you’ll have surmised with exquisite understanding exactly to which institution I would have called home at one point in my previous existence. It was, after all, and remains, a fairly well-known establishment, with an exceedingly historic reputation. As, of course, befitted one of my station.” His tones were rich, cultured, his syllables long, measured, and without the remotest vestige of the clipped jocularity they were used to in his usual cadence. 

/Wait,  _ what? _ What, what, what…/

He’d cocked one scarred eyebrow at Giles, then. “As to my letters, I shall only have to tell you that they were earned in halls named for St. John…” Giles gave a jerk of stunned amazement, opened his mouth. Closed it. “So I suppose one might say we share a certain kinship…” And then, with a faint grin, Spike’s voice promptly dropped back into familiar tones. “But I left all that behind, didn’t I? Didn’t really fit my new life. Had a certain demarcation goin’, a new image to maintain and all that…”

Giles must have been more amazed than Buffy had been, because he’d turned away to take a seat, falling into an armchair with a hard, heavy  _ plop _ . “Bloody hell, I need a drink.” And he’d stared up at Spike in clear shock. “What did you… I mean to say…”

“What you’d expect, considerin’. Literae Humaniores and the lot.”

“Oh. Yes. Right. Of course. Certainly. By all means…”

Disengaging from Buffy, Spike had gone over to the liquor cabinet, pulled out a tumbler, cast an eye over his shoulder. “Glenfiddich or Glen Livet?”

A vague wave of the hand. “Oh, either. And, pour yourself one as well, old man.”

“Don’t mind if I soddin’ do.” 

“Just  _ what _ ,” Buffy had hissed on behalf of the rest of the clueless Americans, “was  _ that _ all about? And  _ you!” _ she’d demanded, pointing at Spike, who had returned by now with two gleaming tumblers of Scotch. “What was that… that uber-English  _ accent? _ You sounded… more Giles-y than Giles!”   
  
“Cheers,” Giles had muttered in a darkly amused way, and slugged back a mouthful of the liquor in one gulp. 

Spike followed suit and then poured himself another, tipped a hair more into Giles' glass, all the while not looking at Buffy at all. 

“I’m serious! Spike! Are you, like, closet-stuffy? Because if I’m secretly going to bed with a Watcher…”

“Oi!” he’d roared, swinging around so hard to glare at her that he’d slopped a little whiskey out of his glass. 

“She’s got a point, Undead,” Xander had chimed in, somewhere between confused and amused. “Totally sounded Watcher-y, there.”

“I’m no bloody Watcher.” Burning eyes fixed on Buffy, he’d stalked away from Giles, back to the rack of weapons. Slugged back his own swallow of alcohol in one hard, fast swig, then set down the tumbler and grabbed up the axe again, set to sharpening with swift, violent strokes while glaring at them all with a kind of viciously quelling air, as if daring any one of them to comment further. 

“Could have been, though,” Giles murmured cheerfully, because he liked to live dangerously. He raised his glass and smiled a little, cocking his head in Spike’s direction. “To the Oxford class of… what was it then, old man?”

_ “No,” _ Spike answered grimly, and went on sharpening.

_ “Oxford?” _ Willow had demanded, sounding incredulous.

“Wow,” Jonathan broke in quietly. “That’s… impressive.”

“No  _ way,” _ Xander breathed. “No  _ way _ Deadboy went to college! No way I’m the only one here who… Who… Buffy, did you…”   
  
“I knew,” Buffy answered softly. “I just didn’t know when. Like, if it was night classes after, or…”

Spike shot her a brief, fulminating look. “You,” he informed her quietly, “are a sodding traitor.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Oh, please. You outed yourself. I had nothing to do with it.” She eyed him up and down, did some mental math. “So, what, 1875? Or did it work different back then?”

He buttoned his lip and went on glaring.

“Giles, what was Oxford like back then?” She was seriously curious.

“It was, ah, going through some rapid upheaval in the curriculum…”

Spike snorted dryly and switched from axe to sword without comment.

“For one, you could suddenly earn your degree in the sciences—natural philosophy, they called it then—or in mathematics, rather than only in Classics and the humanities as was once the way, so that they could compete with Cambridge. There were a few other changes; in the exam structure, mostly…”

Spike set down the sword and turned to pick up a mace. “I’m off to go beat something to death, Slayer. Back later.”

She caught his arm. “Oh, come on, wait. Like anyone’s going to tease you because you have a college degree.” Man, he was stiff. “What? What’s so wrong with that? I mean, obviously you can help with the research, and…”

He didn’t move, just stood there like a statue. ‘Vampire Holding Medieval Weaponry’. “Okay,” she asked quietly, “what is it?”

He shook his head; just the slightest jerk. “Not here.”

She let him go. “Okay.”

He whirled and was gone, coat tugged up over his head against the setting sun.

Left behind with everyone watching, she’d shrugged uncomfortably. “I’ll see you guys later, okay? I’m going to go… deal with this.”

To her surprise, it had actually been Xander who had pulled her up. “Maybe give him a while, huh Buff? I think there’s some kind of pride thing going on here, and for something like that, sometimes a guy needs a few minutes.”

Buffy had lifted her eyebrows at her friend, more than a little taken aback. “Okay, since when are you on  _ his _ side?”

Xander had actually managed to look slightly embarrassed. “Look. I’m not dumb, alright? Did you even  _ see _ that? I can’t believe I’m saying this about someone like Spike—I mean, like I even care, right?—but maybe he got bullied or something. Anyway, leave him alone for a while before you go after him, is all I’m saying, Buff.”

“That’s very sensitive of you, Xander! I think you’re starting to see Spike as a person. I’m very proud of you!”

“Okay, jeez, Ahn… don’t make such a big thing of it.”

Buffy had actually taken Xander’s advice, and waited an hour or so before heading to the crypt. She had located Spike outside of it, beating a dead Slugnosh into jelly over the remains of a headstone. “Feeling better yet?”

_ Grunt. Swing. Crash _ . “No.”

“Well, there’s not much left of him. You wanna fight me?”

_ Grunt. Swing. Crash _ . “Not really.”

The rebuff had stung, but one thing they both knew how to do was to give space when it was needed. It had happened a few times during sex, a few times during conversations, a few times just when one or the other of them had been in a crappy mood. It wouldn’t kill her to give him space again. They would be fine. “Okay. I just wanted to check on you. Let me know if you need anything.” Turning away, she’d moved to leave again… and halted when the crashing stopped abruptly. 

“I was a pansy poet who couldn’t even throw a sodding punch, Buffy. When I went away to school I used to be beaten every day by the older lads; and worse. What they call hazing now is a wet dream compared to what they did in Eton back then. Couldn’t fight back, or Mum would go into hysterics thinkin’ she’d lose me too, like she lost Da, so I just had to stand it.” 

/Oh, wow./ Frozen in place with her back to him, she could only listen with her brain stuck in neutral as he ranted on, his voice a grating, gravelly mess. 

“By the time I was at Oxford I was convinced I was above it all, that I was a higher being than that rabble because I wouldn’t even cross swords with one if he insulted me, for all I knew how to fence. But it was a lie. I was weak. I couldn’t even box. I was a failure as a man.”

She had turned back by then, couldn’t help it. And the way he stood, arms and head hanging, mace-head embedded to the ground… He looked like he thought she would walk away. 

She took a step closer instead, and waited.

“When… When Dru turned me, I knew I needed to… To be different. I had the demon in me, roaring for vengeance. I killed them all. Every one of my tormentors.”

_ ‘Earned his nickname by torturing his victims with railroad spikes…’ _ /Oh./

“And then I learned to brawl. Bloodied my fists every night in her honor. Learned to fight so that someday Angelus couldn’t hurt me anymore. So that someday  _ no _ one could hurt me anymore.”

/Oh God…/

“And I stopped writin’ poetry.”

“William…”

He flinched, and his eyes rose, haunted, to meet hers. “Except, sometimes, when I look at you, I can’t help but want to write it again.” His hand rose, carved a line around her in the space between them, like he was drawing fire on the air. “And every sonnet I’ve ever heard comes to my lips when you breathe into me.” His voice cracked, and he looked like he was about to fall to his knees.

Then his eyes jerked away, and he closed up again.

Oh. He thought he was showing her some true self. Like he thought he was revealing something under the coat that would repulse her or something, maybe drive her away. Or like being with her made the old weak parts come out or something, when…

She remembered then, something he’d said that night in the motel room, months ago. Something about how ‘wherever you go you take yourself’. /Oh/ she thought, and took another step closer. “Do you hate me because I make you remember who you were?” she asked him quietly, and wondered how hard her heart would break if he said yes.

His jerked up, his heart blazing in his eyes as he stared at her, incredulous. “Christ, no, Buffy! It’s just… Sometimes I don’t know how to be this! I’ve locked this part of me away since I resolved only to be the monster I’ve tried to be for Dru, and for Angelus; for a hundred twenty sodding years, and now here, for you, all the bloody sudden I’m a man again, in parts, and I don’t know if that man’s worthy of you, or a match at all for you, because he’s a bloody great milksop…”

“He seems kind of beautiful to me,” Buffy interrupted, moving still closer, and smiled. “He’s turned into a hell of a warrior over the last century; and in the meantime… I think I could stand to hear some poetry.”

Spike trembled visibly in the night. “Do you even like the sodding stuff?”

“I don’t know.” /I liked it a little when Owen said some./ “I’ve only heard Dickinson, I think, and, like, limericks…”

Spike snorted, a raw, contemptuous sound, and took one step in her direction. “You need to hear others, then.”

She smiled, held out her hand, and waited. “Show me?”

Shortly thereafter, Buffy decided you’d never lived till you’d had an undead Victorian poet recite verse to you while screwing you voraciously into a bed made out of silk sheets and sarcophagi, and clearly she led a very decadent life for a college girl.

Two days later, Spike announced his new status in a quiet way. Giles was seated at his desk muttering something about a ‘concordance’. Before he had a chance to get to his feet Spike unraveled himself from his cross-legged stance and ducked to pull a green-bound book from the shelf, without any perusal at all. Opened it, glanced inside swiftly—Buffy noticed that it had Greek lettering—before closing it and striding over to the desk. He handed it over to Giles, who was quietly poring over about six other tomes. “This is the one you need, I think, Watcher.”

Giles took it from him, lips twitching but otherwise working hard not to make a big thing of it. “Ah, yes.” He’d adjusted his glasses, read a line or two, nodded. “Yes, fine. Just the thing. Thank you, Spike.”

With a stiff nod, Spike had turned away and gone back to leaning nonchalantly against the bookshelf with arms and ankles crossed, and Buffy could not have been prouder of him if he’d come in carrying a dragon’s head for her. Leaning in a little, she had murmured low enough that only he could hear, “I think you are incredibly sexy. Just so you know.”

He had uncrossed his legs and straightened, seeming to inflate. “Yeah?”

“Duh.”

Of course, Giles had to ruin it. On the way out the door, as Spike had leaned in through the serving window to hand him the tea mug he’d been using, Giles had flicked him a brief look and a faint smile. “‘Love hath made thee a tame snake.’”

Spike had frozen up tight, and for a second Buffy thought he was going to throw the cup right at her Watcher’s head. “Oh, shut it, Rupert.”

“Not to say I’m not grateful. But it’s true, for all that.”

Grabbing Spike’s arm, Buffy had dragged him away, out toward the door. Once outside, in the late evening shade in the corner of the atrium thing, she had hissed at him, “What the hell was  _ that?  _ Do I need to go back in and punch him?”

Spike had shaken himself and settled in with a slight frown. “No, it’s fine, love. Just a bit of scholarly teasing.”

/Okay, that is just so not helpful./

Correctly reading her expression, Spike had sighed and lifted two fingers to her lips. “Doesn’t matter, pet. He’s right, anyway. ‘I do love nothing in the world so well as you; is not that strange? I am one who loved not wisely but too well. I burn, I pine, I perish. Hear my soul speak of the very instant that I saw you; did my heart fly at your service.’”

At a loss, Buffy could but blink at him. “Okay? I mean, that’s gorgeous, but I have no idea what half of it…” 

“We have to get you into a poetry class, pet.”

“Oh jeez. You know I’d flunk it, right?”

He’d leaned forward to capture her lips with his. The kiss had taken a while, so that by the time it had ended, she had pretty much forgotten the point of the conversation. “I’ll help you.”

“Huh?”

“Plenty of ways to make poetry memorable.”

Okay, cue the blushing. She distinctly remembered every word of the ones he had told her in bed. “Alright, but if you do it that way, I’ll spend the entire class turning colors and squirming around, and everyone will think I’m some kind of poetry nympho…”

“And the world will lie in awe of my tutoring methods.”

“Jerk.”

Just when everything seemed to be kind of at station-keeping, Oz showed back up, because why not have things go all fubar. Of course he asked Wil if she had a new guy, and Wil went completely tongue-tied about it, while Buffy and Spike, on their way out of the room to leave them alone, stared incredulously. “Wil!”

Wil had blushed, looking away. “Um, not a new guy, but… A new… girl.”

Oz had stilled. Gone very silent for a moment, then, “Oh. I didn’t… expect that.”

“Yeah. Neither did I. But it happened.” Wil had lifted her eyes to his, shy but serious. “I’m still really glad to see you. I missed you so much. You have no idea. I mean… I’m… I’m really confused about you being here… but I’m really glad to see you.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

They had let themselves out.

Buffy met Tara, finally, during all that mess, when Wil and her girlfriend were trying to talk Oz down from going all wolfy on her. Apparently even though he knew about Wil’s new relationship and the guy part of him was good with just being friends, the demon part of him was still having a tough time with getting his mind, or his hormones, or his lizard-brain, or whatever it was, around that fact in some kind of primitive, ‘that’s my mate’ kind of way. Which, okay, Buffy got, now that she’d been with Spike for a while. Heck, she got it from her own internal, primitive Slayer place, though it was kind of hard to articulate that to Wil. Also, she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to admit how much she got it, even after Spike had explained it to her afterward. But suffice it to say, Oz had spent a lot of that interaction huddled in a corner of the empty lecture hall trying to talk himself down while partially wolfed-out, because it was a full moon and he’d smelled Wil all over Tara and, forewarned or not, bunch of Tibetan meditations or no, it was evidently tough to tie all that instinct and emotion down when faced directly with the evidence that one’s chosen mate was otherwise claimed. 

He’d managed to control the change in the end, with whatever new anti-wolfy meditation he had going, kept himself to ‘human but hairy’ and stuck at the halfway point, but apparently it was a near enough thing that he ended up raggedly begging for Wil to bind him. Wil had, her tones broken as she’d clasped hands with a very rattled Tara to weave the spell. Then he’d whispered to Buffy, “Hey. Can you and, uh, Spike there, if he’s helping, get me somewhere safe? I need…”

“Somewhere with a different bouquet. Got it.” Spike had been quietly understanding as he’d helped Buffy gently strong-arm the rigid, immobilized werewolf out and away from the hand-clasped girls and manhandle him down to the cage he had once used on campus. 

The next day, he was gone. Wil relayed the story to Buffy in their dorm room; not weepy, per se, though clearly emotional. “He couldn’t apologize in person to Tara; you know, since that wouldn’t’ve been safe this close to the full moon, but he was all profuse with the regret. I mean, as profuse as Oz ever gets with anything.” She’d tried a little half-shrug. “He used three or more words.” 

“That’s big.”

“Yeah. And he… He told me to be happy…” Her voice had hitched, causing Buffy to tighten her hold on the chilly, slightly-shaking hand. “He wanted to try to be friends, you know. To stay. But I guess… he couldn’t deal.” Her eyes had lifted, gray and pained. “The thing was… that’s all he was trying to do, was get it under control enough to come back for me, but he knew it wouldn’t be fair to ask me to wait for him, since he didn’t know if he even could, or how long it would take. And Buffy… if I knew that was what he was going for, I probably would have waited, you know?” 

Buffy had nodded encouragingly. 

“But then I wouldn’t have met Tara, and…” Will had looked away, biting her lip.

“And you’re happy now.”

Wil had sounded almost guilty when she’d answered, sharp and protest-y. “I am! Is that bad?”

Buffy had rushed to cover her friend’s hand. “No, Wil. It isn’t. You moved on. It’s been so good for your mental health. And you know… I think he understands, right? I mean, he might’ve wanted to stay this time around, but if the wolf won’t let him... It’s a part of him.” A breath, wondering if she should even say it, but… Oz was a part of Willow, and it wasn’t like her and Angel. Oz had been so good for her. There hadn’t been that… weirdness. So if they could be friends, that would be of the good. “Maybe someday…”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Wil had shrugged, a painful little movement. “Though, I dunno. Because he really loves me. Like, really, really. And I love him, you know; like will always? But I don’t think the wolfy part of him can deal, and I… I need to be with the person I…”

“The person you’re in love with right now. I get it.” Buffy had smiled at her bestie and patted her knee. “You know I get it. It was like that with me and Spike. Part of me will always love Angel…” /Putting aside wondering how much of that was actually loving him and how much of that was him putting some kind of weird vampirical claim on me, because I don’t even know anymore, and how can I separate it in my head?/ “…But I’m with Spike now, and that’s uber-intense, and I have to do what’s right for me now. Especially when that first love… can’t work. So yeah. Definitely get it.”

Wil had nodded. “It still hurts, though, doesn’t it? Thinking about the might-have-beens. Wondering whether it all means… it was never meant to be?”

/Yeah./ “Maybe… Maybe those relationships were like… training wheels on how to love?”

Wil had bitten her lip and nodded, then smiled. “I have to go talk to Tara.”

“Yeah. I think you should do that. And Wil?”

Wil had lifted troubled eyes, reservations filling them. 

“She seems like a really nice girl. I mean, not that she talked much or anything, but… If you guys want, I’d like to get to know her.” She left it hanging.

Wil had blushed, big and rosy and one hundred percent pleased schoolgirl. “She’s… great.” It came out bubbly and gushy. “I really want you to know her too. If…” A tiny shrug. “Do you think Xander’s gonna be all weird?”

Buffy had shrugged. “I think you more have to worry about Anya sharing a bunch of stories about any lesbian escapades she might have had over the years.”

“Oh man, I never thought of that!”

After Wil ran off to go talk to her girlfriend Spike had re-emerged from his hiding place to sit behind Buffy, rubbed her shoulders bracingly. “So, Wolfboy’s off again, then, is it?”

Buffy had leaned back against him and nodded, eyes closed. “Sometimes first love just doesn’t work, and you find out the next one is the right one.”

A low rumble of amusement. “Dunno. Thought for a minute there they might work out a way to make it a threesome. All the lad had to do was find out how to be a bit less possessive, and…” A spreading of the fingers as if to say, ‘hey-presto’.

Buffy had jerked around to stare at him, nonplussed. “Oh my God! You are so…”

“Inventive? Devilish? Mildly evil but chock-full of great ideas?”

“I can’t even. Whatever! A threesome? Wil would so not…”

“Sure about that, pet?” Thoughtful eyes rose to the door. “Could see it, m’self. More a question, could her witch-friend go for it.”

“You are so the complete worst.”

“I’ll go to the city offices and buy my trademark tomorrow. First, though… best earn my patent.” And bending, he’d applied his lips to her neck.

“Oh, God. If you… ever suggest… such a thing to me… I’ll stake…” The ‘complete worst’ was doing the complete best things to her neck and his hands were wandering to… places. “Dammit, I’m trying to…”

“Never would. Shared a woman with Angel before. Never happen again.”

Exasperated, she’d punched him, an action which, it must be said, didn’t deter him in the slightest. “So not what I was… Oh, God…”

“Mmmm? What exactly did you have in mind, then?” And he’d nipped her till she’d bucked against him.

She’d honestly had no idea anymore by then.

The dorm room had been empty more and more often of late. As such, it had become all the more romantic a locale. Studying was no longer strictly the first activity on the docket, unless one called anatomy lessons ‘a study’. 

Buffy sighed as she twirled her stake and marched through the graveyard, looking neither to the left nor to the right. All summer after school had been great, even. Sex, learning about this Sineya chick and the Slayer line, more sex. A few trips into the desert with Giles to shake a gourd, listen to her Watcher chant, get in touch with a dreadlocked, feral creature who seemed a hell of a lot more like a wild animal and who moved much more like a demon than she was anything like a tame, modern Slayer. Which, okay. Talk about some thinky-thoughts about self and the relationship one had to the demons one fought. A few discussions with said First Slayer, mostly in dreamy code, both in the desert and in dreams; dreams which included waking up not a few times in her vampire’s arms, startling him out of his sleep shouting inane things like, ‘little miss muffet!’ because why not be haunted some more by that weird thing she’d shared with Faith... and also some stuff from her meditations with the First Slayer-Guide chick, like how death was her gift. 

It had taken her a while to work that one out, the whole ‘no matter how much she embraced her Slayer side, she couldn’t lose her humanity, because she had let that part of her, let love, bring her to her gift’. Which was, apparently, death. That whole thing had briefly scared the bejesus out of her, till Spike had pointed out, with certain amusement, that he was kind of death incarnate, and he would like to think of himself as a nice, gift-wrapped package for her, sitting around helping her to remember how to love at any given moment, even when it hurt.

He’d had a pretty fair point.

In general, there had been a lot of time spent in bed with Spike; some of it spent having poetry murmured to her between some exceedingly loving sex which was turning more and more kinky as time went on, which… Well. Let it just be said that her incipient embarrassment about such things had quickly vanished as proceedings… proceeded. She was even venturing outside more with him, since there was also a whole lot of very flirtatious sparring that got more and more hot and heavy as the uneventful summer months dragged on. Like ya do. That kind of thing made sex in public venues seem very attractive.

No one was going to walk by at night in a cemetery, right? Except… they kind of could, and should that prospect contribute to her arousal as much as it did? 

Probably not, but it was tough to care when you had a Spike. 

Spike tended to make thinking, much less worrying, an impossible pastime. And, really, life honestly couldn’t get any better in her book. 

That was, until that douche Dracula had shown up to try her, because apparently Spike was right and her fame had spread stupidly far and wide, and now baddies were coming from freaking Europe to give her a shot. Except Mr. Eurotrash 1400 or whatever had to take  _ his  _ shot with a bunch of stupid party tricks and crap. 

First, the dickhead showed up right in the middle of Shady Rest, mid-patrol, and tried to be all seductive to her, right under her vamp’s nose, like ‘I came to meet the creature whose darkness matches my own’, yadda yadda. As if she should be Miss Flattered-cakes and fall at his caped feet. 

Spike, of course, took exception and got all flipped out. To her irritation, he had actually stood in front of her while she was still… Well, okay, to be fair, she was acting a little starstruck that someone like the actual Dracula had even heard of her, but look. Till that night she hadn’t even known he was a real person and not book-monster-guy, so cut her some slack much? Anyway, sure. It had probably put her vamp’s back up a little, but still. Macho, threatened boy-games, much? All, elbowing in front of the actual Slayer to be all, “Look, you tosser, back off. And any road, if you need to talk to anyone, it’s me. You still owe me eleven quid, you poncy prick!”

Cue a little domestic discord of the ‘I can fight my own battles’ nature, which hadn’t endeared her to Spike, nor Spike to Buffy, and et cetera. Things had been tense from then throughout the ensuing emergency Scooby meeting, and she had—it turned out, stupidly—gone to bed alone that night; at Revello instead of joining Spike at the crypt. But okay, even if Dracula could turn into a bat and fly off (nuts, right?), Buffy could still so handle him.

Or so she had thought. Till he’d turned up in her bedroom and thralled her.

The discussion in there was so messed up, with the word ‘magnificent’ being thrown around, like she was all needy. When you’d had someone like Spike talking you up for like nine months, having some rando vamp with pancake makeup glamor and Fabio hair come in to do it was a little less convincing. “I bet you say that before you bite all the girls.”

“No, you are different. Ki…”

“Look,” she’d interrupted, impatient and, frankly, kind of worried about the whole ‘showing up in her bedroom made out of smoke’ thing. “Not that I’m not flattered that you came all the way to California to meet me and stuff, and I’m definitely down to fight you, but this whole vamp-seduction thing? Not my gig, okay? I’m a taken girl. I mean, you saw. I have a vamp boyfriend. I’m vamp-taken.”

“I do not see his mark on you. And the others… they are old. They were unworthy.  _ He _ is unworthy. Perhaps this is why you do not let him…  _ taste _ you. Because you know…” Creeping closer, all slithery sensuality, and, just, no. 

/I am really, so very much not getting into this with you, of all assholes. And see me not having visible qualms about the subject in front of you? No qualming right now. Zero./ “He is  _ so _ worthy. We just… haven’t discussed it yet. I still have some trauma over the way the last one went down. But he’s mine, and I…” Her voice had hitched over it, unable to say it. Not yet. Not when she had so successfully avoided considering the question in depth thus far. “So anyway, thanks for coming all this way, and for the offer, but…” She’d leaned back, scrabbled away into her pillows. He was way too close, totally in her space now, and… “You can’t just waft in here with your music video wind and your hypno-eyes and think I’m gonna let you jump in ahead of my guy!”

“I have searched the world over for you. I have yearned for you.” The prick had actually sat on her bed, totes uninvited; which, by the way, it had taken them a hot minute to figure out how he’d managed  _ that _ little invitation trick. “For a creature whose darkness rivals my own.” Tried to touch her, to peer at her neck like a creeper.

/Um,  _ so _ much with the no! Max no-fly-zone!/ She’d scrambled backward a little further, unsure why she hadn’t been able to fight, to stake him, to…

He’d just smiled at her, all sensual unconcern, as smugly certain he’d have her as if she were some kind of kitten he could eat. “You remember. The embrace. His bite. You  _ remember.” _

So gross. And weirdly compelling, like all old vamps, and she  _ hated _ this. Hated that he had the  _ pull. _ Hated the way it dragged at her, sucking her in toward him like fleshy magnetism. It made resisting a feat like lifting a building with her mind. “This is not gonna happen.” Just pushing the words out past her lips had taken all her breath and will. But she had done it, because just the thought of… /And oh my  _ God _ , Spike would be so…/ He would never,  _ ever _ recover from the hurt. “Not from  _ you _ .”

“Do not fight. I can feel your hunger. So much I have to teach you; of your history, your power. What your body is capable of. Why… we are so much alike in our difference. You feel it, do you not? And you long to know… why.”

Okay, his insinuation pissed her off; the assumption that she didn’t know herself, didn’t know the source of her own power. “Listen, you Eurotrash bastard! I…”

“All those years fighting us; your power so near to our own...” He’d crept closer; ever closer, crowding her; caressing her neck with chilly, beckoning fingers that raised gooseflesh and made her breath hitch, unwilling, hating the familiar arousal he could command. “And yet you’ve never once wanted to know what it is we fight for? Come now. Let me taste you, and then you will beg. You will want to taste me, and have an eternity to learn…”

Buffy had rolled her eyes, abruptly beyond done. And some of the fog had lifted. /Beg? Um, try again, Mister!/ “Okay, you’re  _ so _ full of yourself. I would definitely not do that with anyone but Spike.” /Because for one, he would never ask. And if I ever did that… it would be a game; at _ best _ ./ “Are you  _ serious? _ Just wow.” And she’d scrambled—okay, half-fallen, but grace was so not a factor in that moment—from the bed to fumble in her nightstand. 

As if realizing he had overplayed his hand, Dracula had held one up; a soothing gesture that had indeed quietened her mind somewhat. “You would not change. You must be near death to become one of us. And that comes only when you plead for it.”

The chink found, held, the thing in the back of her mind had reared up in that moment, rebelling against the thrall. “Okay, you know what? Do you think I was born yesterday? I  _ know _ that, you dumbass! I’m not a child! I’m the damn  _ Slayer!” _

“You think you know what you are. What's to come.” Some of the seductive air had failed, giving way to frustration. A hardness. “You haven't even begun.”

Her own hardness, rising to match his. “Oh, buddy, you don’t even know. You are so barking up the wrong tree there, mister. I know where I come from. I’ve felt it; with Spike and on my own.” Words rising from somewhere in the back of her mind, behind where the human parts of her stumbled, half-asleep. “I’m from thousands of years of ancient strength, down to the first Slayer. She was all demon-y power and totally undomesticated, and I feel her at the back of my mind one hundred percent of the time. I don’t deny her anymore; when I’m in bed with Spike, when I fight, when I slay. I don’t need some outdated vamp from a European backwater to come here and talk a bunch of bullshit about how only he can give me the secrets of the universe.”

Dracula had drawn back, looking startled. “You know already that we are kindred, you and I?”

The word had Buffy taken aback. It had an interesting intonation, and one that totally reminded her of something Anya had said last December but upon which she had for some reason had never followed up. “Kindred? Anya said we had a kinship. Huh. Thanks for the note. I forgot to talk with her about that. I’ll hit her up about it ASAP. But as for you…” Shaking her head to clear the few remaining cobwebs, Buffy had managed to fumble finally for the stake she kept in her nightstand drawer. It had been part of some slightly edgy sexplay here and there, but had otherwise never made an appearance before now. This time, it was a bit more serious. “Get the hell out of my bedroom before I turn you into a dusty little pile of bad makeup, you waste of a Pantene commercial.”

Dracula’s too-pretty face had twisted. “You will come to me. I have your friend.” And, turning into smoke like a ridiculous carnival trick, he had literally  _ drifted out of her damned window, _ the freak, before her stake could do more than waft him around like smoke. 

Which was how she had found out he had thralled Xander and turned him into some crappy Renfield; an event which had filled Spike with some kind of sick glee and thoroughly pissed off a possessive Anya.

Speaking of possessive, when Spike found out that Dracula had been in her bedroom trying his wiles on her, he had completely turned into Mr. McJealousVamp, which was so not the most attractive look on him. It hadn’t made anything better, since for one thing, Buffy totally thought she should have gotten points for resisting thrall and crap, what with the Master making her all susceptible or whatever, and with the ‘old-vamp-buzz’ to contend with. /I mean, that’s totally a first for me! I should get a parade!/ So while Wil, Tara, and Jonathan went around putting wards on everyone’s houses and stuff, Buffy basically told Spike to stop being a big baby and marched off to go save Xander. 

Of course, Spike followed her, all teed off that she was ‘playing right into the git’s hands’, and, per Willow’s later account, vowing first to save her and then to kill her, or vice-versa. Giles had followed, trailed by Anya and the magicks brigade. 

Giles was out of the running really super fast. Pretty much the minute they entered the maze, he ended up trapped in some pit full of Drac-wives, and was, per Spike, no doubt seduced in some kind of vamp-ho dogpile; which, you know, the less Buffy ever heard about that the better. Not that she was one to talk, but also, good blackmail material in future if Giles ever gave her crap about her yen for vamps and all that, because he had literally zero room anymore to yap about her weakness when it came to vampire sex appeal. /Let’s just leave it at that./ 

Giles probably realized it too, because all his little digs and crap had been suspiciously absent ever since. 

Jonathan… Well, he just basically got lost somewhere in there. Anya spent a lot of the time apparently marching straight into Xander and slapping some sense into him once she found him, then demanding that Wil and Tara do a spell to “Get him back into his right mind, I don’t care if he’s under a spell! Dammit, Dracula is sexy, but I didn’t think he was sexy enough to get to Xander! Though I guess I should have. Still; this is taking things a little too far!” 

Buffy and Spike got separated for a short while by some weird trick of the bizarre ‘castle’, and Buffy had a final, solo showdown with Drac. He tried to thrall her yet again, and yes, tried for a second time to get her to do a little bit of vamp fluid-bonding with him, which, just, ew. “Look. I told you. If I’m going to be exchanging pleasantries of the bloody kind with any vamp, it’s gonna be Spike. I’m pretty sure I can figure out how we’re ‘kindred’ with him. You might’ve noticed he’s a Master vamp himself, and plenty old enough for me to get a nice buzz or whatever. And besides; we have an actual  _ relationship _ . You’re a total stranger, so no offense…” And she’d punched Captain Shiny in the face with her stake-hand. “I’m not that kinda girl.”

The throwdown had been brief, unfortunately; mostly because the stupid jerk cheated. She staked him twice, but he just kept turning into stupid misty crap and reforming. 

Which was when Spike had come around the damn corner like some kind of insane Brit-punk cowboy,  _ thrown a gallon tank of gasoline _ on the reassembling dust, and tossed his lit Zippo at it.

Cue the infamous Count fucking Dracula, up in goddamned smoke.

“Guess I’m never gonna get my eleven quid,” Spike had muttered, and pulled out a cigarette, then frowned in frustration, standing there empty-handed and sans lighter. “Oh, bloody hell. And now I’ve lost me best lighter. Christ.”

He’d just stolen her kill. And he could have burnt himself up. He was about a foot from a sizzling pyre of vamp, over there writhing and shrieking as it blazed up into melting and reforming skeleton, and oh my god, he could have died, he could have dusted, he was so  _ stupid _ …

Shoving him around the corner by his lapels, Buffy had had him up against the wall before he could speak. Had slapped the stupid, unlit cigarette away, nails digging into his neck. “You absolute fucking imbecile!” And then she had swarmed aboard him, so terrified that she was going to lose him that she had probably lost her damn mind for a second. She had definitely gone at least halfway into tunnel-vision-Buffy, with the Slayer-y thing roaring in the back of her mind as she’d slammed his shoulders hard into the stone and ripped his belt and jeans open. 

He had been willing enough, snarling back at her in abrupt game face. “Fucking  _ mine _ , Buffy!”

She had snarled back, no longer able even to articulate anything, and lifted up to basically impale herself on him, and alright. Yeah, so they had fucked right there against the wall of the world’s most notorious vampire’s stupid castle, Spike whirling around to slam her against the stupid stone wall and glaring into her eyes with feral, amber abandon while a celebrity burned like a merry torch behind them. 

There at the end she was sure he was going to bite her. She had almost invited it. Could have just tilted her neck and let him. But in that moment… she just couldn’t. Not with the smell of that bastard smoking away right over there, and hints of gasoline on Spike’s hands. Because he could have  _ died; _ and what if the fire had jumped onto him? Or, what if they did, but it was all just because he was trying to prove something; or because  _ she _ was, and not because…

If she ever did this with him, she wanted it to be special. 

Not like this. So at the last minute she had closed her eyes and pulled away. And he had growled, pumping into her, and got them both off with a kind of angry ferociousness she had never felt from him. And dammit, it didn’t have to be like that, and she hadn’t  _ meant _ it to be like that, and she knew he had been hurt, but okay, so was she, and…

And he hadn’t touched her since. And it had been  _ days, _ now.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Alrighty, then. Welcome to These Violent Delights!  
Let me know what you think of the kickoff to season 5!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone! Thank you all so very much for such a lovely reception to the season 5 version of these two crazy kids! 
> 
> Here we go with the next step in their redoubtable adventures, wherein you FINALLY get some full-on, porny smut with these two to repay all your serious patience. Because I'm a cockblock, but I can only drag it out so long, lol.
> 
> Kudos to our dear wolf_shadoe for being the beta of the year, the way she has read ahead on this thing as fast as I can churn out chapters. I'm on something like Chapter 28 or some damn thing on this and she hasn't even slowed down!

The problem was, it wasn’t just his fault, of course. She had come around to that sometime in the vicinity of late yesterday, when Mom, having watched their downward spiral for a worried two and a half days in silence, finally frowned and said, “Look Buffy. Far be it from me to get in the middle of someone else’s relationship, but I’ve been in a bad one, and you have a good one here. So let me give you the wisdom of the ages. It’s never all one person’s fault. Whatever you’re fighting about… there’s blame on both sides. And if you don’t talk it out, you’re maybe gonna lose something incredibly special.” And then she’d narrowed her eyes at her daughter; eyes they shared, eyes too alike, sometimes. “And no offense, but I like Spike too much to let that happen. If you let him get away, I’m still keeping him.”

“Wow, Mom,” Buffy had breathed, taken aback. Though, not that she had been all that surprised. Her mother and her vampire were basically besties. Whenever Spike wasn’t with Buffy he was down at the gallery, or hanging out with Mom in the kitchen or in front of the TV, drinking cocoa and watching _Passions._ __ Aside from his ‘used to be a proper demon, those were the days’ convos with Anya over the gallery counter, and his weird, bristly, one-sided chats with Giles about book-stuff, Spike didn’t exactly have tons of friendships, and most of them were a little edgy, or had fences. Clem; poker, mostly. Willy; comrades in the way of business while being the default Master vamp in town… but that was more about running things in the Slayer’s name as a sort of unofficial deputy. And that was about it.

Well, technically he was friends with Buffy’s little sister, but that was more of a big-brother thing than a friend thing. Like, they were friendly, but in a weird ‘brat-and-overprotective-bad-influence’ kind of way, and Buffy would never understand their dynamic if she lived a thousand years.

She understood her mother’s codicil, though. If Buffy ever, god forbid, broke up with Spike, she was also going to keep him. He was not only her lover but her business partner and her left hand, her psychologist and her dream-interpreter (which, those had been coming thick and fast lately, for sure!), her confidant… Her all-around best friend. She hated to say it, but he had surpassed even Willow on that front (though maybe it wasn’t so disloyal to say it at this point, since Wil probably felt that way about Tara by now, not that they’d specifically discussed it. They tended to walk way wide around that conversation). Spike just… knew her in a way no one else ever would. Anyway, she simply could not imagine her life without him in it in some shape or form, so… yeah. Spike. There, at her left side, no matter what. The end. 

/Which means, I have to find a way to fix this./ 

A heavy sigh escaped her lips, because the problem was, doing that would probably require her to word, and she was just so, so bad at that. Most of their communication was practically done at submarine level. She floated around somewhere at about his midriff and just sort of bumped him in the dark till he caught her with his hands, lifted her to his eyes, smiled, nodded, gave her a little smirk, said something like, “I hear you, Slayer,” and then kissed her, and it was all good. But that sort of crap wouldn’t work this time, and dammit, she was going to screw this up royally, wasn’t she? She always did when she tried to talk. 

/I’m gonna hurt you worse, aren’t I. I’ll get mad, or say it wrong, or…/

Probably best if she just… showed him. /It’s usually the best way. Eventually he gets me, even if I have to do a lot of show-for-tell before he picks up what I’m putting down. Which…/ She glanced up at his impassive countenance from where he strode next to her, all stiff resolve and cut-glass cheekbones. Damn, stubborn vampire. He was still so pissed off, or at least he was clinging to his determination to be mad at her till she made the first move. 

Jerk. He knew how hard that was for her! 

Gah! 

/Well, fine. Don’t make it easy for me this time. I’ll just… Show you./

She quailed slightly, thinking about it, even as she got more than a little warm in her nether regions. /The question is, are you actually  _ ready _ to show him?/

Letting out a long, slow breath, she nodded firmly to herself. /I think I am. I just have to… be brave enough to step up to him and…/ “C’mon,” she insisted firmly, because, action? It was what she  _ did _ . “Let’s go… talk.” 

He started, and to her surprise his hand was chilly in hers despite the warmth of the evening air as she seized him in a firm grip and half-dragged him toward his crypt. Thank goodness they were already in Restfield tonight. It saved time. 

It was easy enough to alter his trajectory from gate to home, since she had taken him unawares. He for sure hadn’t expected her change in tacks, considering their current mutual temperature. But you know what? It was fitting, dammit. And they needed to have this out, once and for all. Needed privacy for it.  _ Especially _ this. /For sure we don’t need Dawnie poking her head in the damn door while we… It’s gonna be hard enough for me to figure out how to make this romantic, the way I screw stuff up without trying. We so don’t need fourteen-year-old interruptions for  _ this! _ / And there would be. Her little sister had the most execrable timing on the freaking planet, no matter how quiet they tried to be. /She’s such a  _ nosy _ little… Ugh./ 

That had always been half the point of having the crypt, right? Not just a convenient place for post-slayage sex, and not just a ‘get Spike some digs in a hurry to get around Mom’s house rules’ thing. ‘Little sister with huge crush on vampire boyfriend’ so did not help in the getting sexy-times alone with said vamp-boyfriend part of the equation.

She had never had that problem with Dawn when she’d been with Angel. But then, Dawn had always kind of despised Angel, and had never made the slightest secret of it. At best she had barely tolerated him, and for the most part always avoided being in the same room when he was around, so that had helped with the whole getting make-out time department. 

Not that that had mattered when Buffy couldn’t have had said sexy-times with Angel no matter how much she might have wanted to. Whereas now that she was with a vampire who provided much repeated sexual-tension-relief on a regular basis, all the sudden Dawn was all over said vampire’s case all the damned time like an adoring puppy, trying to monopolize all of his time and practically competing with her big sister for his attention.

Hence, crypt.

The decadent ambiance was conducive to a certain level of exploratory kink, as well. Not to mention that there was no one around for miles—or at least no one alive and non-demonic—and the thick stone muffled all sorts of full-throated noises. And dammit, Buffy tended to make the hell of a lot of noise; or rather, Spike tended to make Buffy make the hell of a lot of noise, and sue her if she didn’t feel like stifling herself. She had been doing that, one way or another, for her whole life till recently. Just, no. 

Spike watched her as he held the door, his expression illegible in the gloom. She stepped ahead of him into the relative coolth of the main space, though she didn’t take a seat or anything. The upper level tended to be a little dusty lately, and sported that vaguely-neglected sort of, ‘not really lived in anymore’ air, because he spent most of his chill-time at Revello, or at her dorm, or with her at Giles’ house when there was a Scooby meeting. Like, he came over here sometimes when he wanted some time to himself, but for the most part, the upstairs area was kind of nil in the hangout department. 

When they were here, they were mostly downstairs. 

Consequently, Buffy waited, not bothering to light any candles or anything, for him to join her. He did so, closing the door to leave the room in darkness, then passed her to head further in, and resolutely lit the closest wax pillar with the cheap Bic he’d picked up since Dracula. /I should get him a new Zippo/ she thought in passing as she watched him move, silent and wary, his back to her. /Dammit, Spike,  _ talk _ to me./

He didn’t, though, and she just knew if she started, she would say something wrong. “Do we… have to be up here? Can we go downstairs?” Not that either portion of the nest was less cool-verging-on-chilly, but this part was by far the least comfy. They had tried, between the two of them, but it still leaned a hair toward seedy, while downstairs was… Well. 

There were blankies. More candles. No windows to let in the air, late summer though it was. It was just generally more welcoming.

His shoulders went rigid, but he nodded. “Sure,” he answered, too lightly, and headed over to the hole in the ground. Shoved aside the flat stone that served as a trapdoor, and jumped unceremoniously down without waiting for her.

God, it was already going wrong, though Buffy honestly couldn’t for the life of her figure out how or why.

She followed, trying not to hug herself. Moved in behind him in the dark, making him out only by the faint outline of his body, the pale blob of his hair in the scarce remnants of light trickling down from the one candle upstairs. Touched his taut shoulders, wondering if she should pull off his duster. “Spike, I…” /How am I supposed to do this? To tell you I’m… ready?/ 

/Maybe…/ She trailed her fingers over his uber-tense neck, down his chest a little. Back up again over his shoulders. Caught the lapels of his coat and tugged it away. 

He let it drop, arms dangling stiffly. But he remained silent as a statue while she tossed the heavy article over toward the corner of the bed; as motionless as ever a vampire could be. /Are you even here?/ He needed to be here, with her. He needed to… When he… When they… 

Just thinking of it was starting to make her very, very wet, and achy, and she was beginning to realize how very much she actually  _ did _ want it. But dammit, he didn’t even seem to get it, and how was she supposed to tell him if he wouldn’t even turn around and  _ look _ at her? “Spike, will you just…”

Her voice caught around the lump in her throat when he tensed even more. She hadn’t even realized that was  _ possible _ . “Thought maybe we came here to talk, Buffy, not to have a quick shag like it never happened.”

/Wait, what? You think…/ To say she was stunned by the bitterness in his voice was an understatement.

“Know slaying makes you hot,” he went on grimly, still avoiding her eye. “Never thought I’d just be a means to an end for you, though, luv, or that you’d push m’ feelings aside like this, ‘cause it’s easier than facin’ ‘em.”

/Oh my  _ God! _ / He was so  _ stupid! _ He thought she’d brought him down here just to… To seduce him so that she could get off? Like, yeah, sure, she was horny, but she was also trying to make this right the only way she knew how, and how could he even  _ think _ , after everything they had been through, that she would… “You are such an idiot,” she hissed, glaring, and backed off to throw up her hands. “I can’t  _ believe _ I ever thought I wanted this. God, you’re dumb.” Flinging herself away in a wide turn, she marched off to sit on the nearest large trunk, unbuckling her sword as she did so to cast it aside. It landed on the stone ground with a clatter. “Sometimes I don’t even know what I saw in you in the first place.”

He swung around then to glare in his turn, dander up and eyes glinting darkly in the faint hints of candlelight. “Oh, yeah? If I’m such a bloody idiot, tell me how I’ve got it wrong, Slayer? You lure me down here, you start runnin’ your hot little hands all over me, you don’t say a soddin’ word…”

Buffy lifted her eyes to his, miserable. “Because whenever I try, it comes out wrong, and I wanted this to be right. But I guess it’s always gonna be wrong no matter what I do either way, huh?” God, she was going to cry. Her throat was tight and her eyes were burning, and this was too embarrassing. She should just run, shouldn’t she? It was a stupid disaster, like always, and... 

Something she had said, though, had arrested him. He stilled, drew closer finally. Crouched in front of her, softening. “Wanted what to be right, pet?”

She couldn’t look at him. “I just… I couldn’t when he was there, burning, and I could  _ smell _ him, and I was so  _ mad _ at you!” She was stumbling over it, and it had all sounded so meaningful in her head, and of  _ course _ she was making a hash of it, but dammit, this was why she had wanted to  _ show _ him, not tell him, and… “And I could have  _ lost _ you! You could have burnt up too, and I would have had to smell you dusting, burning…”

“Buffy…” he breathed, confusion clearing, comprehension dawning. But by now she couldn’t stop, because it was all flooding out.

“And then you… You were there, still with me, and I was  _ so _ worried, and I  _ so _ wanted you to…” She realized from somewhere distant that she was biting her lip to keep the tears from falling, remembering. And dammit, she was beyond aroused, still, just thinking of what it maybe would have felt like, because  _ everything _ with Spike felt better than... But if he… “But I didn’t want it to be because you were mad at  _ him _ , or maybe even mad at  _ me _ a little, or trying to prove a point, or…” 

“Oh, bloody hell.” He sounded awed, and kind of poleaxed. “Buffy, you don’t ever have to… I wouldn’t have…”

He was so dumb, sometimes. “Of  _ course _ I don’t, but I did, and you  _ know _ it; but do you think I wanted it to be like  _ that? _ Dammit, Spike, I’ve already  _ done _ this wrong once! Do you think I wanted it to happen that way with  _ us?”  _ It had taken her this long to realize that she wasn’t mad so much as just plain scared. Scared that they would screw it up somehow. Do it wrong, when... “If we ever did that, I wanted it to be  _ special _ , you idiot.” When he gaped at her, she lost it. Surged to her feet so that he had to follow, hit him in the chest. “God, why are you so  _ stupid?” _

In an instant, every ounce of his remaining ire fled in realization. He caught her elbows, drew her in close, dropped his forehead to hers. “Oh, bugger, Slayer; oh Christ, I’m so sodding sorry. I didn’t realize. I’m a right ass. Please don’t cry. I’ll…” Ran his hand gently through her hair; just a bare whisper of a caress over her bangs, growing out around the frame of her face. “Bloody hell; can we start over?” 

She hadn’t meant to cry. She considered it an unfair advantage. He gave up everything to her when she did, went all to pieces, would promise her the moon, the stars, the universe on a string… and it wasn’t fair. Consequently, she fought to pull herself together. “Sorry. Sorry, it’s just…”

“No. Don’t. Just…” He shook his head, threw his arms away from himself, looking desperate. “Christ. Here, please, pet… would you just… close your eyes for a tick?”

“Huh?”

His blue ones pleaded with her. “Buffy… for me, would you do this? I’ll tell you when to open them.”

She was completely at a loss now, still riding a squall of emotion like a small bark on huge combers, way out to sea… but she trusted. And did.

She could hear him, moving around her, first to her left, then to her right. Little rustlings, small movements. A hollow, dull tap. A grating click, though no longer the one that had become familiar as anything she had ever known. And then the smell of wax slowly warming. /Oh./ He was setting up candles. Several, by the sound of it, all around the chamber, on probably every surface. Lighting them. 

He had scrounged about a metric fuckton of candles for down here. The place would be…

It would be like make-up sex inside a glowing, flickering globe of light. And he would look like… With all those alabaster cuts and curves and disciplined planes and landscapes of muscle and bone and sinew, limned in saffron light, he would be…

Her confused arousal came roaring back, this time accompanied by a serious whammy of emotion. / _ God _ …/

“Alright, love.”

Holding her breath, she opened her eyes. And was briefly dazzled. 

It was both exactly what she had expected, and more beautiful. And so was he. 

The chamber’s normal scents—moisture, cool stone, soil, rugs, the faintest hint of decay, a touch of whiskey and Spike’s cologne… they were all trumped right now by an overpowering aroma of melting wax. He had turned down the bed. The infinity candles in their glass pillars and cleverly-rigged tubes, made to re-form from their own demise, blazed all around it as if creating some sort of ritual circle of flame, burning steady and dependable in the motionless air of the catacomb like an unyielding symbol of what stood between herself and her vampire. Heat, but an immovable thing, too; never to be quenched. Life, light, a thing that fed and replenished itself, melted and molded and renewed; burnt and was never spent. 

And Spike. He stood before her, hands open in supplication. He had removed his shirt, and the warm light danced a little over his chest, his abs, his arms… and reflected in eyes that carried his heart to hers. “Buffy.”

It was question, hope, request, prayer. She smiled a little through the mist, stepped to him. Took his hands. 

Relieved, he wrapped his arms around her, buried them in her hair, closed his eyes, and lowered his cheek for a moment to her crown. “Bloody hell, woman,” he murmured again. 

“Shh,” she whispered, and pulled back. Lifted her hands to his cheeks, zeroed in on his eyes, then his mouth. “Take me to bed, William, and we’ll find our way.”

“Christ,” he answered, and walked backward with her toward the waiting furniture, his searing gaze never leaving hers. Fell back when his calves struck the stone plinth of his bed, drawing her with him, over him. She came along, let him pull her over his body to lay across him, crawled in concert with him as he put down a hand and edged himself further up; trapped by eyes blazing into hers like blue fire. “You sure you…”

“Yes. And I don’t want it to just be…” Lowering her head to press her cheek beside his, she nipped his neck, arched up, pressing her hips down to grind against his erection. Felt his awed intake of breath flutter against her ear, her jaw. “I want to share myself with you, the way you have with me.”

He went utterly still, freezing in her arms. And then the world whirled as she was spun, him atop her abruptly, staring down into her eyes with an expression teetering between fearful and ferocious, and surely she would burst into flames from the conflagration going on inside of him. “I need to know you’re sure,” he whispered, rough and shaken. “Need to hear it again. Christ, Buffy, after what my sod of a grandsire…”

“I’m sure.” She  _ was _ .

“Oh, bloody, bloody, christing fuck…” His head dropped to the hollow between her neck and her shoulder, and he was shaking now. She wasn’t sure she had felt him tremble so hard since last winter, when all this had started. “Oh, love. Oh God…” And then he was up again, hand cupping her cheek. “I’m not askin’ for that. I don’t need it, pet. I’m happy bein’ yours. Fine. More than. Bleedin’ ecstatic. You’ve nothing to prove, there’s no sodding contest or…”

“Listen,” she answered, soft but firm, so he’d  _ hear _ her, and laid her hands to his chest to push him away. Sat up, faced him dead on, caressing the smooth muscles of his pecs, the long sweep of his collarbones, lightly palming his nipples till he shivered. “You’ve had my blood already, so that’s no big. Somehow it got all turned around the first time, but we’ve done it since; a dozen times. More. And it’s been great.” More than. He  _ begged _ her to bite him sometimes, pled for it. Roared like a caged animal freed as she did. As she called him hers; bellowed his belonging to the universe as he came, hard, and gave himself up to her. And whether it should be or no, it was unbelievably hot to know that he was so willingly owned. That she held title and deed of him in her hands, in some strange vampiric way that was terrifying and heavy with responsibility, and yet incredibly light for the way it seemed to hold him safe and utterly complete. 

And once, the thought of belonging similarly, yet again, had been frightening. But that was then, and this was now. /I would still belong to me, because unlike the last time, you would come  _ with _ me. Because you belong to me too… and because you don’t hold leashes, at arms-length. You hold in arms, and cup in hands, so no one would ever feel the pull of a collar. You do what I try to do and probably fail half the time. You don’t… push away and then tug. You give instead; and you always forgive when I forget, or pull away. Or; jeez, maybe you  _ like _ to feel it. But just knowing that you… That I could be sure that you would never…/ God, how she wanted to know what it felt like to be as safe as he looked when he stared into her each time she made him hers; when he fell apart, and melted… and  _ knew _ . 

Buffy wasn’t dumb. She knew for a fact that her vampire would never leave her. Spike couldn’t. He didn’t know  _ how _ to leave. Even without the blood-leash she held, even if she threw him away—as if she ever would be that dumb—he would stay. But to know it on a cell-deep level, the way he did? The way he had known with Drusilla, and Drusilla with Angelus; the binding of it?

She knew it had been a double-edged sword, that knowing. That there would be no possibility of leaving for one, but plenty of opportunity for the other, the one who held the leash, to drop it in the dirt and vanish, leaving the one with the broken collar bereft. That pain had stood not just for Spike. But that was because those bonds hadn’t been mutual. And so Angelus had been cast out by Darla, leaving her empty-handed, and so in turn Angel had left Drusilla broken, and broken Drusilla had cast out Spike, whose heart had already left her, and on and on… 

But there was no leaving at that bone-deep level. Not really. They were still all bound to each other in a way that Buffy could never touch. Drusilla, and even freaking  _ Angel _ , still held a part of Spike that she couldn’t assail with the strongest weapons she had ever known. She could see it, feel it when they were around each other; something she could never break into or get between… and she wanted him free of it, bound only to her… if he wanted that. Call her a jealous bitch, but the thought that her  _ ex _ held a part of her lover that she didn’t and might never have, a hold over him, a pull… It was anathema. Anguishing to watch how they interacted, how they could cow, wreck, destroy one another with a look or a word, and the thought of putting herself into that kind of mix was terrifying and potentially painful, yes… But Buffy knew pain. She knew risk, and gambles for big odds. And this would be different. What they had built was good. It wasn’t about power, or control; and it would be  _ mutual, _ which it wasn’t now. 

And they could both be secure in it. 

More than that, and maybe it was an addiction, but dammit, she wanted it again. Wanted that feeling that was the only part she missed from before; that safety-trust-belonging on a mystical level. Because yes, she and Spike had that already in one way. They had it because they had built it without. But to have it settle into their bones, bound by blood magicks?

God, yes, she wanted it. Wanted the circle closed, and to know for a fact that there would be no leaving. Ever. /Because with you? I wouldn’t survive it, to see you walk away./ Not that he would or could. But still. /Even if I was ever the one stupid enough to send you. So don’t… Just  _ let _ me./ “Spike. God, please. I’m fine with how we are, too. But I remember how it was.” She managed a shaky breath, because she could never impugn his honor by saying all that. He’d be so offended, even if he understood. 

But if she took refuge in logistics… 

Besides, she was kind of mad, still, that he had never told her. “And do you think I ever want some other asshole to come waltzing in trying to take what’s yours, spouting off about how I must not love you enough because I haven’t let you? Do you think I want these idiots here in town thinking that I don’t respect you, when you’re my  _ partner? _ Because I know they’ll think that means deep inside they don’t have to respect you either; and you can’t lie to me. I know sometimes even wet-behind-the-ears fledges give you crap about that…”

He gaped at her, astounded. “You’re the Slayer, Buffy! No one thinks any vamp’s gonna claim the Slayer!”

She rolled her eyes, abruptly impatient at the omission. “They all know a vamp already did. And that I’m with you now, that you’re my Master in this town, but that for some reason I’m not extending you the same courtesy. They’re wondering why, and they’re gonna keep giving you shit about it. I know you don’t tell me about it, but…”

He sat back, looking away. “Didn’t figure to bother you. My problem.” He rubbed his hand over his face, looking more than a little irritated. “How the bloody hell did you find out?”

He wasn’t going to like it. “Willy.”

She was right. He went rigid, one eye peeping through his fingers, sparking with amber. “Are you sodding serious? That little pissant thinks he can get in the middle of our…”

Buffy held up a hand, dropped it to touch his by way of forestalling the outburst. “He was just trying to help.” And god, how it had hurt to know that someone like Willy the Snitch, ally though he was now, had known something about her relationship that she hadn’t, had never even considered. 

_ “Hey, kid,” _ the barkeep had muttered to her one evening about two weeks before Dracula had blown into town.  _ “Gotta ask you something.” _

Having just had a seriously frustrating conversation with two Thurgalds over their refusal to cease dealing in contraband Tagash venom, Buffy had not been in the best mood as she’d turned back to the rat-faced informant.  _ “I’m not really in the mood for questions tonight, Willy.” _ She’d rubbed wearily between her eyes with her stake-hand thumb-knuckle and sighed.  _ “No, I haven’t seen any of the Initiative leftovers around; yes, I’m still holding a hard line on the trafficking thing; no, I don’t care if it impacts your business…” _

_ “Not what I was gonna ask, kid. More along the lines of a personal thing, actually. Which, you know what?”  _ He’d been polishing a glass beer mug with a rag that had seen better days, but all the sudden he left off to twitch a grimace at the crowd.  _ “Maybe we should step in the back for a sec.”  _ Without waiting for her response he’d turned to one of the regulars.  _ “Hey, Thomas, can you watch the bar for a few, make sure none of these assholes takes any of my booze?” _

_ “You bet, Willy.”  _ Smoking a cherry cigarillo, the hulking thing, something Buffy vaguely identified as being in the Ferava family, twiddled its Freddy-Kreuger-esque claws cheerily and nodded. 

She supposed she wouldn’t argue with it, and followed Willy back toward his rooms, somewhere between exhausted and mildly curious as to what the hell had him in such a lather to get her away from the clientele.  _ “Okay, Willy,  _ what _?” _ It had been a very long damned day. She’d had a pop quiz in History  _ and _ in Soc, she still had patrol to get to, she had to go all the way back to campus tonight because her first class was at eight AM, which was practically dawn—only those insane-os who took O-Chem got up earlier than that. That was like, before breakfast!—and she was wiped. 

_ “Listen, kid. I don’t wanna get all up in your business, but I figured you should know.”  _ Willy had looked totally anxious; practically jittering. _ “Some of the vamps, and even a few of the other demons who care about that kinda thing, are givin’ your guy a rough time about the one-sided deal. Didn’t know if he’s been tellin’ you, but it’s makin’ his unlife kinda tough when it comes to keepin’ the peace in your name, which probably makes things tough from your perspective too…” _

She had been at an utter loss.  _ “The one-sided deal?” _

_ “Yeah. The whole ‘you own him but he doesn’t have a claim on you’ thing?” _

Cue one very embarrassed Slayer turning some very bright colors. 

_ “Guess he didn’t tell you.”  _ The answer to that must have been written all over her so-not-a-poker-face, and Willy’s expression had gone oddly regretful about being the messenger.  _ “I kinda figured, since the last time I brought it up he about took my head off.”  _ He’d cleared his throat anxiously, avoiding her staring eyes.  _ “Look, I’m not tryin’ to get in your business. Like I said, it’s no skin off mine if he wants to make life hard on himself, or if you don’t mind if he has to pull a double half the time just keeping the youngsters in line, but I just thought you should know he’s getting mocked a lot on the playground; especially since every vamp in town and half these other idiots know you let his grandsire have a crack at you. I mean, the evidence is right out there, front and center…”  _

Talk about ready to sink into the floor. She had automatically moved to cover the old scar before defiantly dropping her hand.  _ “Look, that was…”  _

_ “Master did it too, kid, and you lived. Honorable battle scar. You staked the bastard and turned his bones into talc. Hell, you put Angelus down too, but this was after, right? So now they’re all wondering… what about the current Master vamp in town, since you’re two for two when it comes to workin’ with ‘em or stakin’ ‘em, so what’s that mean for this one? And, you know, that puts him on real unsteady footing when it comes to whether they think he’s gonna have a super long tenure as the big boss.”  _ He’d shrugged uncomfortably, looking a little away from her.  _ “You and I both know it’s the real thing, and maybe it’s complicated. But I just thought you should know.” _

Lifting her eyes to Spike now, Buffy sighed and touched his lips. “It’s not the main reason,” she assured him softly. “But I wanted you to know… I get how extra hard you’ve been working.” She narrowed her eyes. “Also, you’re so way not off the hook for not telling me what was going on.”

With a low groan, Spike sat back on his heels and shook his head. “I didn’t want you to think I was tryin’ to use it to get you to let me… Bloody hell, pet, I wouldn’t…” 

God, it was cute. He was actually stumbling. Maybe even this close to stammering, which, wow. Feeling affection for him fill her like warmth, Buffy sighed and cupped his cheek. “You’re such a giant doofus.”

He lifted his gaze back to hers, confused. Narrowed his eyes again. “Look, you mad bint. I told you. Never gonna take advantage. Not my buggering git of a grandsire. Won’t manipulate or…”

She kissed him. It was the only way to shut him up. Well, that and other related activities.

He was still trying to talk through the kiss, but he gasped, broke it off with a hiss when she wormed her hand under his belt to tickle his cock (which was, it must be said, not nearly as confused as he was by the conversation). “Do I have to manipulate and take advantage to get you to bite me?”

He growled, thoroughly overloaded. “You’re being unfair and cruel and confusing, and you know I’m gonna have sod-all ability to think about this or do this rationally if you keep… Oh fuck!” Desperate, he grabbed her wrist, fingers digging into her tendons to hold her still. “Buffy, wait. Please.” 

The ragged tones in his voice stilled her far more than his grip could ever do, and she felt tears prick at her eyes. “Do you… not want me?” she heard herself ask, feeling a little far away. 

“Oh, buggering hell. Bloody, bloody fuck. Christ, Buffy, I want you more than anything, I just want to be sure you… Oh shite…” For a vampire, he almost sounded like he was about to hyperventilate. 

How could she tell him she meant it? That she wasn’t afraid? “I… Dammit, Spike, you know I can’t word like you do! How do I get you to understand?”

His forehead lowered to hers, his cool breath wafting over her face. “Can’t make a mistake here, love. If I do, and you end up resentin’ me, and I lose you…” His hands rose, cupping the backs of her arms. “I belong to you, and you belong to you, but I can’t risk…”

There. That was  _ it. _ “Yes you can,” she whispered, fierce and uncompromising. “I need some part of me to belong to me enough to decide what to do with it. Because otherwise I really belong to the world instead, and it can take me away anytime. And I know I do. And I know that any minute it can ask me to give  _ everything _ . To die, or take  _ you _ . But this way… you won’t ever lose me, and I  _ can’t _ ever lose you. You won’t ever… leave. Because you’ll be in my blood, and I’ll be in yours.” She pulled away to regard him fiercely, on fire with certitude. /I  _ know _ it’s for keeps, you dope. And I’m not afraid!/ “And this will be  _ mine _ , because no one can take it from me. Not the stupid Council, because sometime they’re gonna find out about this and want to; and not some idiot fledge some night who got lucky, and not some apocalyptic whatever. And maybe I can  _ live _ with you; because something is coming, Spike! Something is always coming, but I can  _ feel _ this one, and it’s  _ big _ , and it’s on its way, and I  _ need _ you; and we’re not even. We’re lopsided, and it’s just been me for so  _ long _ , and dammit, I want to  _ belong _ somewhere!”

“Oh, bloody, buggering hell, lover,” he whispered, low and devastated, and dragged her into his arms. “Buffy, Slayer, oh, love, then yes. Belong here, with me. In my arms, forever.” And rolling her, he lowered his mouth to her throat, sucking hard, fast fingers at work to ruck up her skirt. “Come here and let me have you, and I’ll make it so soddin’ good for you, kitten, oh Christ…”

She was already lost to his hand, arching up as he found her panties, and, “Oh God…”

“Oh, fuck, love, you’re this wet thinkin’ about it?”

“I  _ told _ you,” she breathed, shuddering up toward the cruel knuckle that had barely grazed her. “Oh God, don’t stop.”

He made a sound that was half groan and half snarl, and her skirt was up and her underwear down and he was sliding down between her thighs, and she had hold of the thick coverlet for dear life as he plunged in, greedy for the evidence of her arousal at the thought of his having her in every way. And ohgodohod, he was so good at this, she had never known before him how  _ essential _ this was; to be raked from clit to core and back and sometimes further, because he had done things to her she had never even considered before him; to have his ravenous tongue hollow her out from her brain to probably her toes, rock her whole body with eager strokes, and she was coming, already coming, had hazed out, clenching down on nothing, so that the sudden departure of sensation was a shock… 

Though not nearly as much a one as his cock, sudden and abrupt and filling her while she was still coming, pleasure and pain and oh  _ god _ …

“Jesus fuck, oh God, sometimes it’s like you’re punishing me for it, Buffy; making you come. Less, more, hard, not hard enough…” He thrust, and she doubled up around him, lifting off the bed, collapsed back to wrap her legs around him, lost. And then he was losing himself in her, and she couldn’t think, he was deep, battering the place inside her that needed more, that was greedy, hungry for him, please, more, harder, forever, she was going to unravel, thought she screamed ‘YES!’ but maybe it was just in her head…

And then he was at her throat, on  _ his _ side, bumpy and breathing harshly, waiting… and there was a moment of stunning clarity. A moment in which she could accept, or turn away. 

Her nails raked his ribs, dragged down on his shoulder blades, punched into his neck. “Please.”

“Oh Christ,” he whispered again, a true prayer this time, and thrust again, hard enough that lights went off behind her tight-closed eyelids. And his fangs slid into her. 

It wasn’t like before; either time. No agonizing gnawing feeling, like a shark. No serrated, ferocious tearing. Spike felt like a burning, piercing ache that spread, abrupt and sudden as unexpected but wanted penetration; a question that required only acceptance. 

He didn’t drink. Instead he hung there, shaking, made a little grunt against her. 

It was a question she knew the answer to. “Yours,” she whispered, and meant it with all her being.

His arms went tight around her, and he made a low sound. Almost a sob. And then he was holding her so tightly she almost passed out from it, and the low pulling began, in tune to the resurgent thrusting inside of her, so that every slow, deep pull was punctuated by the slow, gliding impact of his cock, each familiar fluttering of his tongue against her carotid like what he always did on her clit, so that it answered, thrumming against him, and she was going to… She was going to… God, from  _ this _ , she was going to…

And then one of his hands was loose, had slid between them. The second he touched her clit to match what his tongue was doing that was it. “Fuck, fuck, oh God, Spike, I’m so  _ yours _ …” She ground it out, biting down hard on her lip, ground it out on his cock, wrung it out on his hand, lifting, seeking, and his hand clenched hard at her lower back and pulled her close, and shuddered, and shuddered as he came in her, growling her name all the while, into her blood.

Buffy had never had an orgasm like that before. It almost felt… doubled, somehow; a rushing, localized surging exploding from her loins, coupled with her usual—amazing—internal ecstasy and the maddening, overpowering overwhelm Spike was bringing to her clit, and it was all so much that she couldn’t… She couldn’t…

Alright, she maybe kind of lost track of things for a minute or two there. 

She started paying attention in there somewhere when she felt him closing her up in long, tingly sweeps of his tongue that felt like he was setting off teeny-tiny, straight-pin-sized explosions beneath her skin. “I…” She blinked then. She felt like jumping up to go fight something. Like beating something to death or sparring or… “Did it work?”

Long, slow strokes from the backs of black-painted fingernails, sliding up her sides, bumping over her rucked up shirt. Lips, finding her nipples. A vast surge of contentment, of awe, competing with the vibrations of renewed want thrumming through her from the stimulation. “Would you _stop_ that? You’re gonna make me nuts. Answer me! Did it…”

He ceased his attentions to lay between her breasts, voice incredibly husky. “It definitely worked, Buffy.” 

“Are you sure? You didn’t say anything.” God, she felt good. But completely high. She wasn’t going to be able to sit still much longer. Either there was going to have to be more sex, or some judo moves or something. 

“Oh, I said something.” He sounded amused. Amused! 

Buffy frowned, confused, and touched her solar plexus. It felt like his laughter was located somewhere inside of her abdomen instead of his. 

Her body jumped, striving to leap off of the bed without consulting her. “Why am I so wired?”

He sighed and rolled abruptly off of her before she could forestall him. They were unceremoniously uncoupled, which was rude, and why did she feel so suddenly chilly? “Because _ I _ am. Because I had your blood, love, and I’m high as a sodding kite.”

“Huh? And get back here…”

He did, and nuzzled, spoke into her neck till her flesh was crazed with it. “And since we’ve closed the circle right and proper, it seems we can feel each other now. Feels a bit like sire-bond, actually, though stronger. Used to be able to tell when Dru was hacked off at me, any rate. This, though…”

Buffy frowned, working her way through that. “Wait, so you’re saying since you feel like you could dance with a Mack truck, so do I?”

He lifted away slightly to regard her. Cobalt eyes glittered on hers in the candlelight, a little reserved as if he was watching for an unexpected reaction. “Seems so, love.” He tilted his head a titch, the yellow glow glancing off of his alabaster bod. “Bit more than you bargained for, no doubt…”

/Oh./ He was worried she would run. And to be fair, she was maybe a little overwhelmed by the thought of feeling his feelings and stuff, but… “Did you expect it? I mean, feeling a bunch of Buffy-stuff is probably more than you…”

Spike shook his head, eyes blazing on hers. “Felt you come,” he whispered. “Bloody fuck, love. Did you feel me? Because that was…”

/Oh. Was that what…/ “Oh, wow. I… Oh.” Well, no wonder. “Um, yeah. I think I did. Jeez. That could, um, come in handy.”

He looked reverent. “Shagging you was already a sodding miracle, Buffy,” he whispered. “Bloody hell.”

/Ditto. Oh, God./ “You mean, it’s gonna always be…”

A slow smile spread across his face; one with just a hint of a smirk, but mostly wonder. “I’m thinkin’ so.”

“Well, that’s just…” Buffy closed her eyes, belatedly aware of a new logistical problem in the works. “Okay, how am I ever gonna get anything done anymore?”

He started laughing. 

She flung herself backward on the bed, glaring. “Oh, shut up. I’m already addicted to you. And how are you not already in me again, if you’re feeling me like I’m feeling you? Because if  _ I’m _ going nuts here…”

_ “Je suis tojours a ton service, mon amour,”  _ he whispered cockily, and bent to tug her blouse the rest of the way off her body. 

“Okay, I caught that one,” she whispered back, and shivered. 

“Good,” he murmured, and dropped his mouth back to her breast.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Hope that y'all feel better about the whole Drac situation. Next week we'll commence the whole, actual S5 storyline. You know; now we have a nice, mutual bond-o-claimyness to make things more interesting.  



	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... more smut in this one. We will continue a theme from here on out of making up for lost time, both for y'all's behalf, to thank you for your patience... and on theirs, because THEY are tired of me cockblocking them, lol.
> 
> oh. CW for very brief mention of menstruation play.
> 
> I think that's it.

As they made their way up the steps to Giles’ door, Spike slipped his hand to her lower back. Buffy leaned in automatically, just as unwilling to lose physical contact despite the fact that they could literally  _ feel _ each other now. 

Somehow that almost made it harder to let go. Feeling his emotions, his sensations made her desperately hungry for his touch, for more of those echoes. For the funhouse-mirror of it all, the endless reflections of sensation and emotion cascading through her being and into his, then back again, and again, and again in a ricochet without end,  _ god _ . 

Buffy let out a breath that was mostly a shiver and fought to retain some semblance of sanity about how to word about… conversations. Spike had just asked her something. “Huh?”

/Intelligent, Buffy./ 

“I said, you really think something bad is coming, pet?” His voice was as rough, as strained as she felt.

“Oh. Yeah.” Somehow it was tough to care right now about any of it. “The… dreams lately have been…” God, she wanted to climb right  _ into _ him, or on him and  _ get _ into him; right here against the wall, or… It was dark enough, right? 

Did it even matter? 

His neck was right  _ there _ . She should bite him again. Just to make sure he knew… “Dammit; we probably shouldn’t be let out in public, huh? At least not yet.”

A shuddering sort of chuckle was her only answer, and then she was against the wall, the duster all around her. “Do it quick, love, before I lose my damn mind.”

She had his collar in her hands, bringing him down, his flesh in her lips, his throat between her teeth, and he was shuddering against her. “Christ.” And she could  _ feel _ him. How close he was to coming as she bit down hard, just this shy of drawing blood, thrummed her tongue against the trapped flesh, sucked fiercely. 

Dammit, she wanted him. Wanted to take him and…  _ “Mine,” _ she whispered, releasing him abruptly, because there was never enough time. Never would be.

He trembled, turned his cheek against hers. “Yours. And  _ mine _ .” And dropped his head to snuffle at his new marks on her neck, there on his side where there were no marks but his own. Making her shudder, making her skin want to leap off onto him, making her whole body convulse with the need to  _ combine _ with him somehow, and…

“Yours,” she breathed back, shaking at the feel of his cool breath against overheated, healing flesh, and oh god, they were going to have to go somewhere. It was amazing they had gotten this far.

Well, they hadn’t really. There had been two stops, and they should probably mop up the DeSoto, but it wasn’t like that was a first. She had long since had reason to be grateful for the way those seats laid back.

The faint creak of the door opening, the wash of lamplight almost made her jump out of her skin, made Spike snarl reflexively against her neck, which, by the way, oh  _ god _ . “Hey. You guys coming in?” Willow. She had probably seen them from the window.

Buffy fought for composure, a voice, something. “Yeah,” she managed after a second, and holy crap she sounded husky. “In, um, just a second?” 

“Oh. Okay?” Wil retreated immediately, and Buffy could actually hear the blush on her voice as her friend realized belatedly that she had stepped into some probably very private moment. 

“Christ,” Spike whispered, and it was half-groan. “Gonna have to button up the bloody duster. I’m soddin’ indecent.”

“You’re not the only one.” Buffy was literally awash, knew he knew it, and they had yet to graduate to full-on public sex, but if they were going to go there she was almost prepared to make that a now-thing, since the idea of sitting there through a whole meeting squirming like this, with him looking at her the way he did when he could smell her, and knowing he had a huge hardon and…

She bit her lip and very suddenly gave in. The thought of it was too much. 

Unable to believe she was doing this, she grabbed his hand and dragged him around the back corner, past the window, before she could think anymore. /Just don’t. Just… do./ 

There, behind the apartment, where they wouldn’t be giving the neighbor across the courtyard a free show. Scrabbling at his belt, and him staring at her, amazed. “Buffy?”

“Quick. Before they wonder where we went.”

“Oh hell…” And her skirt was up, and his fingers were in her, his thumb doing its work, and she was already halfway to heaven before she had her hand on his cock, pulling him to her while he shuffled awkwardly in his jeans, half-down and just barely out of the way.

“Please. And remind me.” She wound her legs around him, pulled him in.

“Fuck,” he whispered, and came hard into her, fingers still working. And his mouth was on his bite, sucking hard, tongue thrusting in time with his fingers, and she was already coming, crushing down on him, hitching around the almost-too-much of him so that he went still for her, shaking with the power of her need and waiting his turn while she keened against his hair and dug her nails into the duster; just feeling her. And she could feel that too; how it was for him. Hard and almost-pain and so good,  _ god! _

“Fuck…” he whispered again, when she could release him, and then he was moving; and she could feel how  _ that _ was for him. His sensations, mingling with her own till it was hard to tell where he ended and she began. His coolth slaking her fever, parting her like madness, pounding the ache away just how she needed him to… And her heat, enveloping him, burning him; keeping him fevered and on edge and making him crazy the way sun burning his skin made him crazy. Like stepping into a bathtub after you’d been out in the cold, to prove you were still alive, but for him it was the way it felt when he stood just on the edge of a shady spot and the sunrise prickled all around him; like life and death and danger could make a person feel the most alive they would ever feel, because you’re always the most alive you would ever be when you know at any moment you might teeter over that edge. /So of course, you leap, every time./ She was bungee-jumping to him, or skydiving, a quick dash into the sun or dancing with a Slayer, except,  _ dancing. This _ dance; and he never felt more alive, had never felt, in all his century of existing, than when he was in her arms and moving in her… and neither did she, and that was terrifying, and so right. /Death is your gift./

“Fuck, fuck, bloody Christ, oh, Buffy!” Holding him in her hands, his head against her throat while he came apart in her arms; so  _ alive _ . 

/Alive for me./ And he gave up everything to her when he came. Everything of himself. It was incredible. /And you give me these little moments of rest, like little pieces of heaven, and I feel so perfect. Stillness in your eyes, where there’s nothing else but knowing who I am, and who you are, and that I’m… complete./

He could be alive, with her. And she could be at rest. /My gift./ Sometimes he made her cry, he was so perfect.

When she could breathe again, when he could let her go and meet her eyes, she smiled so that she wouldn’t, though he would see the tears edging her lashes. Stroked his brows where, behind blue eyes, amber waited, loving her. “Maybe that’ll hold us over for, oh, fifteen, twenty minutes?”

He saw the emotion there, wasn’t fooled. So, yes, he snorted in amusement at her words, but he also brushed her cheek with one freed hand, then recaptured her butt and dropped his mouth unceremoniously to hers, her ass snugged hard in his hands to pull her in deep against him. Which was fine, since her legs weren’t about to let him go any time in the next decade. 

And god, the way he kissed her… 

At the best of times, kissing Spike could easily be an Olympic sport. The best ever sport. When you added in the whole knowing how it felt for each other, now, and on top of that stirred in emotions? How it felt for him, kissing her, how it almost broke him every time, and the way he became both fierce demon and loving, sweet man all at once. The conundrum of him, and who knew what he felt from her when they did this, but he had to feel that she was seriously emotionally rickety right now, because no matter what, she tried to give him all of her. Which, he seemed to love it, and did there really have to be a meeting? /Let’s just stay out here and… feel each other./

“Where the heck did they go? You said they were out here, right?”

“Uh, Xan? I think, um, just… They’ll be in in a minute.”

“Wh… Oh, you’ve  _ got _ to be kidding me.”

“No doubt they found it important to give each other some orgasms. Sometimes that takes precedence. I know ever since you got that new apartment, I’ve been considering letting you give me a great many more orgasms.”

“Anya!”

“What? It smells better in there, for one thing. I think I’ll visit you a lot more often.”

“Oh God…”

The door shut again, slicing off voices and lamplight.

Buffy disentangled her mouth from Spike’s with an effort. “Damn,” she whispered.

“Yeah.” He sounded as reluctant as she felt. But they’d had their fun. Best go in and get on with the business at hand so they could leave ASAP and patrol or something. /And then use the duster for some more extracurricular sex on a crypt or something, because it would be really cool to feel what the Santa Anas feel like on his skin while he’s naked out in the night air, and woah, my mind is so very much not on business./

Spike was smiling into her eyes; not a lascivious smirk but a tender, knowing smile as he kissed her forehead and very gently tugged her ankles off of his lower back. “Like this new adventurousness, though, pet,” he informed her, keeping it light. She appreciated the effort, appreciated the way he twinkled outrageously at her in the gloom, rolling his tongue behind his teeth in that way that was one-thousand-percent suggestive. “We should work with that.”

It helped keep her emotions on an even keel, going into the lion’s den to face everyone down. After all, it wasn’t going to be fun and they both knew it. /But I’m not gonna hide it, so…/ “Guh.” Scrambled brains did not a big talker make. She so was not going to have much to contribute to this meeting if she couldn’t get herself together. But who knew going all claim-y with him was going to make her so emotionally… what was the word? They’d used it in her psych books. It started with an ‘L’. Whatever. Emotionally all over the place.

“But for now… Sorry about it, love.” With another light caress to her cheek, this time in warning, Spike pulled out of her and gently tugged her underwear back into place. And winced with her at the discomfort of decoupling, the immediate flood of spunk anointing her crotch, seeping past her panties to make for her thighs. “I’ll run interference for you, yeah?”

“And you ask me why I bother to wear underwear. Not that they help much.” She shot him a narrow-eyed look as he hitched up his jeans and tucked himself back in. Logistics would also help. Cold, hard math. Problem-solving to help get her head on straight. “This is the only stupid thing about not using condoms.” 

Thumbing his button through the eyelet of his jeans, he rolled his eyes dismissively. “Would you want to?”

She had with Parker, obviously, and no. Not when it was completely unnecessary. ‘Dead’ men carried no bugs or babies. It was stupidly freeing and way too damned good, if it came with some obvious, immediate consequences. Which she would take. “Nope.” She blinked at him, surprised. “Would you do that, for me?”

He lifted a scarred eyebrow as he buckled his belt, snorted. “Be askin’ a lot, pet, but I’ve already said I’d set myself on fire for you.” His lips twitched and his eyes turned away, almost shyly. “I’m just grateful you agreed about the other bit.”

‘The other bit’ had been discussion back last quarter when they had still been sorting out the ins and outs of their relationship. She had heard about a trial for some experimental new birth control when she was at the campus clinic getting a required shot, and seriously considered it, if only because it would be nice not to have to remember a stupid pill every day. It had sounded a little invasive, having something stuck in her uterus, and apparently it worked well for some women and really, really didn’t for some others, but she figured what the hell? Maybe for a Slayer, with a Slayer’s constitution, it might work fantastically. And besides, anything that potentially saved her even more hassle when it came to cyclical fatigue and random bleeding while on patrol was a good plan, right? 

Except when she had brought it up to Spike as a passing thing, he had gotten all bad and moody about it.  _ “Your body, pet. You do whatever you want, obviously. It’s just…” _

/Okay, what…/ _ “You don’t think it’s a good idea?” _

He’d shrugged. _ “Not my business, love. Shouldn’t even be bringin’ it up to me.” _

Which had been fair, since she wasn’t even sure by that point how they’d even gotten on the subject. Just random, ‘how was your day, dear’ kind of crap, probably, but by then she had been sort of worried.  _ “Why are you squicked? I mean, I get that it’s kinda weird, but it’s probably not gonna hurt me, if that’s what you’re worried about. Okay, it supposedly hurts some girls, but if it does they’ll just take it out and I’ll go back to the pill. No harm no foul.” _

He’d shrugged, looking away from where he’d been lying, stroking her shoulder.  _ “Yeah, I’d worry about that, of course, and yeah, it seems unnatural as hell. And maybe I’m showing my age, and maybe I’m just an old sod sometimes, but it’s odd enough sometimes knowin’ how it works with the bloody birth control you’ve got. But I understand why, pet. God knows I do. With all you’ve got to manage, and d’ya think I want any other bloody tosser following you about scenting you when…”  _ He’d growled and rolled abruptly out of bed to pace around the crypt while she’d watched in amazement.  _ “It’s just… you’re not bound to the moon anymore, time means nothing, and it’s there sometimes, but barely, and I’ll have you, but it’s like a sodding tease, and then gone, and not my place to complain, but… Oh, Christ, ignore me. I’m a fool.” _

_ “A tease?”  _ She’d blinked, confused, and then comprehension had dawned, followed by something between horror and a faint, unwilling arousal; like overexposure and realization all rolled into one, because sometimes it really hit her.  _ Vampire _ .  _ “I never… really, thought about it. God.  _ Really? _ I mean, it’s not…” _ She had had to try really hard not to ‘ew’ at him.

Still not quite looking at her, he had shrugged slightly, staring off into space like maybe his eyes could drill a hole into the stone walls and he could use it to escape.  _ “Not the same sort of thing, Buffy. More of a kink. Never been with a human woman before you, yeah? Not long enough to…” _ Another shrug.  _ “Doesn’t matter. Too much to ask anyway, considerin’ what you have to do. It’s just… At least sometimes, with the way you’re doin’ it, I get it a bit, here and there. If you did the other thing, there might be a chance of nothing, and that’s…” _

/Oh./ He had thought she’d be horrified, so he hadn’t said anything, merely taken what he could get and tried not to make a big deal of it so she wouldn’t take it away. And now suddenly he felt like he had to ask, though he didn’t want to because he felt like it was not his place to ask for her to do something that was extra work added to her day just so that he got… well. A brief, ephemeral treat once and a while, and… jeez.  _ “Sometimes,” _ she’d breathed, surprising herself,  _ “like, once every few months, it… For like a day or so. It hasn’t happened yet since we… But…” _

His shoulders had hunched.  _ “Buffy, you don’t have to keep doin’ something that’s an added stress if you…” _

_ “I know.” _

She had taken her name off the list of girls who had signed up for the trial. Heck, when hemorrhaging was one of the possible side-effects, why try anyway, right?

They each put up with a few inconveniences for their pleasures, worked around a few roadblocks—/Like underwear, heh/—and enjoyed the unexpected benefits when they came. And were paid in dividends they would get nowhere else. “C’mon,” she whispered to him, and caught his hand. “Let’s go in. You can be all Big Bad personality and stuff while I slip away to the bathroom for a second.”

“I get to keep the knickers after?” he asked, flirtatious, and patted his pocket.

It was her turn to roll her eyes at him as they headed for the door.

Stepping inside, Buffy quickly cased the room as was her wont. Willow and Tara sat practically in each other’s laps on the bottom of the stairs to the loft, fingers intertwined and sharing some secret that had Wil blushing a little and Tara ducking her head to hide her slow, secret smile. Good. They wouldn’t be paying any attention. Jonathan was by the bookshelf, buried deep in some tract on, probably, the ancient lore of the Graknar-whatsis. Excellent. Giles, same, poring over some parchment-y thing at his desk, the low lamplight casting a greenish glow on one side of his face. Xander, on the couch, was hunching over the Krispy Kremes box, picking over the selection in search of jellies, powder already on his lips. Good deal. Anya, leaning against the couch near him but not quite next to, had her arms crossed as she watched the door. As they came in and she took in their probably disheveled appearance she smiled knowingly. /Crap./ 

“Oh, good. You’ve gotten the orgasms out of the way. That means we can have a quick meeting and you’ll be able to pay attention. I have to get back to the gallery; Joyce has a showing coming up and I want to ensure we make a great deal of money. Also, I caught her trying to order a  _ Diablo Danzante  _ mask from Caracas last week. Thank goodness I was there before we ended up in a war with dragons made of sun-rays. Obviously art galleries are an excellent import spot for demonic enterprise, and having a knowledgeable point-person on site is a must.”

Buffy blinked, standard horror melting into immense gratitude that her mother and Anya had gone from swift friends to business partners. “Oh, yeah. God, that would be so bad. A what mask from where?”

Giles had tugged his glasses off and was pinching the bridge of his nose, successfully diverted from any discussion of orgasms, thank god. Shaking his head wearily, he shoved the glasses back on and sighed. “I cannot believe Joyce ordered another dangerous mask. Honestly, that woman couldn’t tell a safe artifact from a hole in the wall. Of all the incredibly…”

“Now, now, let’s not jump all over Joyce,” Spike began, holding up a hand, and gave Buffy a swift, inconspicuous nudge in the butt to send her in the direction of the hallway. “It’s not like she knows what to look for, yeah? Any road, she has me, and Anya, and Buffy. One way or the other, nothin’s gonna get in that way. It’ll get sorted, Watcher.”

Buffy shot for a Mona Lisa smile as she headed toward the bathroom, and let the exasperated conversation whirl around her. /Thank you, Anya./ Once again, she had to be grateful for the former vengeance demon’s big mouth. And, apparently, for her mother’s lack of demonic discernment. 

Not that she was grateful, even now, that Mom had let Dracula into the house last week, but still. /Sometimes it works for me./ 

As cleaned up as she could get without a shower, Buffy headed back out a few minutes later to find Spike had settled into ‘their’ armchair in the corner. Grateful that he had given up his opportunity to join her for a quick cleanup of his own—he liked to, he had told her, ‘keep the tackle in good working order for you, pet’—she moved to join him. Plopped herself down on his lap—mmm, very recently-used muscles definitely felt that, which was half the point of the plopping—caught his grin of appreciation, and slipped her damp panties unobtrusively into his duster pocket.

The quick grin brightened to something devilish, and she received a squeeze of appreciation on one arm for her thoughtfulness. “I’ve seen that festival,” Spike was saying with a quick wave of his hand. “Great party those Venezuelans throw, but overall harmless as that Krampus business in the alps.”

Anya looked amused. “Well, that one’s also debatable…”

“Oh, really?” Diverted, Spike leaned forward around Buffy, sounding downright fascinated. “How the bloody hell did I never know  _ that? _ ”

Giles was leaning forward as well in a freakishly analogous pose, just as clearly intrigued. The similarity in their poses briefly wigged Buffy right the hell out. “Anya, I really must pick your brain more often. The Council’s never been able to determine if the Krampus actually existed beyond folklore…” 

“Well, really, they’re a whole family of demons called Perchten, and Krampus is a proper noun for one specific sect, but that’s neither here nor there. We have bigger problems.” 

“Ahn…”

Anya ignored Xander. “I saw the mask Joyce was about to purchase, and the markings inscribed on the face and wings were Kalina. I’ve seen them before. We don’t want to meet those ‘serpents of the sun’. Their whole goal is to destroy the world; to burn it dry and consume everything.”

Giles was up and heading toward his bookshelf. “Amana, the creatrix of the Kalina tribe tasked her son Tamusi to cut away the serpents of the sun and cool their ardor in the sea before the world could be burnt to a husk…”

Anya shrugged noncommittally. “It’s a nice story. Someone did something during an attack and locked a few demons up tight; demons who were powered by the sun...”

“Lucky bastards,” Spike put in. Buffy elbowed him, riveted.

“Anyway, these dragons are angry, and tired of being imprisoned away from this reality. They’re hungry and they want revenge. The Church came along of course and called them devils, so now the humans dance around once a year to propitiate them with a masked festival, but it seems like at least one group is hiding in the crowd trying to free them instead…”

_ “Please _ tell me I get a trip to Venezuela,” Buffy interrupted, excited. “Sun, sea, one of those little tiki bars…” Giles shot her a  _ look _ . “Okay, but world-save-age. And I  _ am _ the Slayer. Isn’t this, like, my whatever? My bailiwick? Shouldn’t I get traveling vouchers or something if there’s a fire to put out?”

“Well, yes, Buffy, but as a general rule the Council has people who handle this sort of…”

Spike rolled his eyes and muttered loudly about slavery. He made no attempt to keep the opinion quiet. 

Buffy winced a little, even if something deep inside and rebellious wanted to agree. 

Willow was already at her laptop, typing away. “This is really interesting. I’m so glad you took my advice and got a router, Giles!”

“You know, you should seriously consider sending Buffy,” Anya pointed out. “If it weren’t for Joyce, we would never have known this was happening. I don’t know who that particular  _ confradia _ serves, but it’s no harmless festival group, and if they succeed…”

“World end-age, Giles…” Buffy wheedled, and turned to Spike, grinning. “When’s this festival, anyway?”

“June, pet. Still got some time.” He shook his head, amusement at her eagerness fading to disdain. “Christ, some tossers are so bloody stupid. Always someone has to get ambitious and try to end the sodding world…”

“I know.” Anya was still on a roll. “You think, ‘harmless dragon effigies’, right? But of course it might not even happen in Venezuela. Sorry Buffy, but the chances of that sort of thing actually working out are much better on a hellmouth than even on their native soil…”

Buffy sighed heavily and flopped her hands on her lap, feeling her chances at a tropical vacation dashed as if with cold water. /My hellmouth, my home, my prison. No glamor for this kid./ “Of course.”

“Though I think I put a stop to it coming here, at least,” Anya answered brightly, “so maybe you’ll get a chance to travel after all. Which is good, when you think about it. If your mother had managed to get this mask into the country, we’d have all ended up enslaved to some lower hierarchy of  _ U’trigash _ or  _ Gadah’gan _ before next week.”

Buffy shot Giles a hopeful look.

Pinching the bridge of his nose, he removed his glasses and dangled them, clearly at his wits end. “I’ll take it up with the Council.” And he shot Buffy another look. “Not that you’d be in very good odor with them right now should they discover certain… facts, so the idea of bringing you to their attention seems a rather poor move…”

Buffy sighed heavily. He had a point, since she was kind of amazed she had flown under the radar this long with the whole ‘consorting with another vampire’ thing. “Well, it sounds like we have time, anyway,” she huffed, and mentally consigned the thought to oblivion.

Spike’s fingers tightened around her waist. “How about if there’s no apocalypse again this year, or if she averts the bloody thing, she gets to go do this one as a treat, yeah, Rupert? Time off for good bloody behavior?” His voice sounded grim as he took her part, and possibly angrier than she felt even she had the right to be. Honestly, she just felt tired, weighted down. Spike, she knew, was pissed on her behalf that she not only never got vacations, but that if she ever managed to negotiate one, it would have to be a working holiday. 

Shaking his head wearily, Giles shoved the glasses back on and sighed. “Could we deal with the substance of the current, upcoming, local apocalypse before we focus on ones which may or may not fall into our jurisdiction nine months from now?”   


Spike leaned back into the chair, hands ratcheted so tight around Buffy’s waist that she was practically able to feel his fingerprints. “You’re shaking,” she whispered as the group kibitzed.

“I’m so bleeding brassed I can scarce keep from putting holes in the walls. How can you bleeding well stand this, love? Letting them own your every sodding hour? You’ve long since earned your own time. Why the bloody fuck do you have to have the excuse of putting more blood in the game in the first sodding place just to get the chance to have a buggering break? What the bleeding fuck do they  _ want _ from you?”   


Uncaring for the moment of everyone else’s presence, she turned in his arms, straddled him. Wrapped her arms around his neck, lowered her forehead to his. “Every day and night I’ve had with you since last December has been more of a vacation, more of a treat than I’ve ever felt like I’d ever have. More than I feel like I deserve. I’m so rich. You give me so much. I’m so, so happy…”

He closed his eyes against her forehead. “I’m grateful as hell to be able to give you that, pet, but it’s not the same and you know it, and you bleeding well deserve better.”

“Well, we have nine months. That’s long enough to hatch a getaway plot.” She hesitated. “That is… if you’ll come with me? I mean, I’m probably on my own fighting sun-serpents, but afterward, if you’re there waiting for me,” she wangled, “in the moonlight… On the beach…”

His hand rose, caressed the screen of her dangling bangs back. “I’d be so bleeding honored, love. I’ll travel anywhere with you. Take you anywhere. Christ, I want to show you the world.”

She shivered, entranced by the fervid light of his gaze. “I love you.”

“Love you so bloody much, Buffy.”

They remained locked like that for some indeterminate period, until a throat-clearing interrupted their moment. Buffy took that reminder to recollect how to breathe. “Okay,” she murmured. “Showtime I guess.”

“Yeah. Got your back, Slayer.”

“I know.”

Turning around again, she ignored Xander’s incredulous looks, Giles’ utter embarrassment, Jonathan’s avid stare, Anya’s amusement, and Willow and Tara’s knowing, blushing exchange to address the room. “Alright, so since we’re not dealing with sun-serpents till June… Um… I had a dream the other night, after we got Xander all pasted back together. It freaked me. I think something big and bad is headed our way.”

“W…what did you dream?” Jonathan stammered, all ready to be anxious as hell. This, after all, would be his first trial-by-fire. He’d been razzed enough by Xander about whether he had what it took to be a ‘real Scooby’. Poor guy.

With a sigh, Buffy leaned back against Spike’s chest and threaded her fingers in his. “A flash of a face; it looked like a monk or something. Somebody in a ritual robe. Human-looking, but all bruised and beat-up. A glowing light. And then the light exploded, and there were all these huge flaring lights everywhere, opening in the sky, with dragons and horrible demons flying out; demons I’ve never seen before.” Buffy shivered. “I’m not a fan.”

Giles came back to his feet, looking alarmed. “Dimensional portals.”

“Okay?”

Pulling off his glasses, he nodded and pointed with one earpiece, frowning. “What, ah, color was the light at first? The one you saw glowing, which started all this?”

/Okay…/ “Uh, sort of purplish.”

“Purple, glowing, dimensional portals opening…” He darted toward his bookshelves, all intent and book-guy. “Portals, Jonathan. Willow!”

Willow sprang up, looking harried. “Oh, right. Duty calls, baby.” 

“Go.” Tara released her hands, expression concerned as she turned to Buffy. “You really think s…something really bad is c…coming, Buffy?”

Considering this was also Tara’s first taste of upcoming apocalypse, Buffy hoped the stammer was for the situation and not for addressing her directly. She had done her best in the last couple of months to make the shy girl feel comfortable around her; though probably speaking up in the group setting wasn’t helping. “I do,” she answered softly, and squeezed Spike’s hand to show him she didn’t mean the next comment in any way personally. “I think we’re about to pay for how easy last year was. Apocalypse-wise, anyway.”

He rumbled slightly, but squeezed back to show that he didn’t take it as a diss against what had actually happened. He knew she took it seriously, what had gone down with the Hellions. She would, after all. It had been the genesis of them. /Not to mention those bastards practically turned my town into a wasteland. That was at least a lower-case-apocalypse, right? Localized end of the world?/

It had definitely had the potential to be a personal apocalypse. Thank goodness she had instead had the sense to see the chance for what it had been instead, and gained the love of someone as constant and imperative to her being as her William. /I don’t even know what my life would be like right now if… If…/

“Nothing in  _ Nostrans Guide _ about opening multiple dimensional portals…” Jonathan murmured, tossing one thick tome onto the nearest flat surface. The  _ thud _ completely disrupted Buffy’s thoughts, for which she was grateful. Thinking about life sans-Spike was not really conducive to happy emotional reality.

“Nothing in _The_ _Quaternary Sollust_ either,” Willow answered, sounding discouraged, and shoved her book back into the shelves. 

Giles made a frustrated face, flipping pages on a huge folio. Slammed it shut. “Glowing light,” he muttered. “Portals…” Turning, he glared at his library as if it had personally offended him. “I need access to the damned Council library!” And he shot Buffy a brief, sideways glance full of some fierce anxiety. “Daren’t bring them into it, of course.”

Buffy sighed and lifted her chin. Gave Spike’s hand another squeeze and slid from his lap to stand. /Definitely showtime./ She was grateful, of course, that her Watcher was willing to run interference for her with those English jerks, whatever he felt about her personal choices, but now it was pretty much a done deal. If he knew that, maybe he wouldn’t stress so much. “Um, so, if they found out, but also found out that there was nothing they could do about it, do you think they’d send the wetworks guys again to get rid of me?”

Spike growled his opinion of their chances as Giles lifted his head slowly to blink at her, thoroughly nonplussed. “Beg pardon, Buffy?” he asked, confusion dominating.

With a little shrug, Buffy turned her head to expose the left side of her neck. 

Xander, of course, was the first one to react. He leapt to his feet, immediately livid. “You  _ didn’t! _ Oh God! Buffy, you  _ can’t _ be serious. After the last time, I can’t  _ believe _ you…”

“It’s not what you think,” Buffy cut him off flatly, and nodded to Spike.

Without bothering to rise, Spike turned down his collars to show his own marks. He never had before. Honestly, the Scoobies were probably the last members of the local supernatural community to have missed that memo. 

Giles’ face drained of color as he turned to stumble to the nearest chair, fumbled for the arm. Sat heavily, like his strings had been cut and he’d aged about twenty years in a second. “Oh, bloody hell…” he whispered. 

/Wow, he sounded like Spike there./ It took Buffy a second to recover from her Watcher’s shock. /Man, if  _ he’s _ that floored…/ It also cleared up, pretty immediately, whether or not the rest of the Council would recognize the significance. “If they know,” Buffy pointed out reasonably, and shrugged, trying for nonchalant. “I mean, it’s not like they can undo it, so… And anyway, you said we needed them.”

At this point her Watcher had his face in one hand. She wasn’t sure if the sound he was making was a sob or laughter. “Giles, you okay?”

“Think we broke him, love.” Spike lifted his voice, jerked his chin at Xander. “Fetch Watcher some scotch, yeah? The good stuff. He’ll need it.”

“What… just happened?” Xander whispered, for a wonder losing all his belligerence in the realization that more was going on here than just some biting thing. 

“Just get the alcohol, Harris. Poor sod needs it. Had the hell of a shock just now.”

Nodding like a mechanical toy, Xander turned for the liquor cabinet. “Uh, on the rocks or neat?” he asked, then shook his head. “Never mind. Probably neat. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times; ice is water, and water’s just a waste of space.”

Willow winced so hard Buffy couldn’t miss it from here. Belatedly she remembered some of the things Xander had said in the past and realized that he had probably played bartender to his alcoholic parents a number of times growing up. Buffy had had no idea what ‘neat’ meant until just this moment, but Xander clearly had no problems with such definitions.

“You want me to get it, Xan?” Wil called.

“No,” he answered grimly as he scanned the bottles, settled on one, pulled it down, opened it with some sort of weird determination, and reached up over the bar to grab a tumbler. “I’m fine Wil.” 

He came back around a second later with a few fingers of amber liquid in a glass, handed it to Giles. The Watcher blinked up at him, shook his head. “I appreciate it, Xander. And don’t worry, I shan’t ask you to pour me another.”

Xander nodded and returned to his seat, hunched and frowning.

“I miss something?” Spike asked under his breath, looking mildly at a loss.

“I’ll tell you later,” Buffy whispered back and, with a low sigh, turned back to the group. “Well?” And waited for the fallout. 

Willow took up the unspoken vote. “So, um, what’s the deal, Buffy? I mean, I get why Giles would be freaked that you two are doing the, um…” She waved her hand weakly. “The bite-y thing, but why is he all…” She frowned over at the Watcher in serious concern.

“And for real,” Xander interjected, clearly horrified, “biting  _ back? _ Oh my  _ God _ , Buff!”

“Oh, don’t be such a bigot, Xander,” Anya scolded him. “Biting is fun even if you’re not with a vampire. I swear, sometimes you’re the most vanilla…”

“Hey! I’m not… I mean I’ve… When you want me to…” Snapping his mouth shut, he turned aubergine and collapsed back onto the couch, looking horrified to have spoken at all.

“It’s okay,” Anya trucked on blithely, patting his shoulder. “You’re getting better.” Turning away from her madly blushing fuckbuddy, she smiled and leaned over on the back of the couch to settle her chin in her palm and regard Buffy with clear fascination. “I never got the opportunity for either, though not for lack of trying. You know; in the way of fun, not for anything permanent. I was most definitely not in the market for what you’ve done, which would obviously add an entirely other dimension, but…” Frank interest was predominant; an almost predatory absorption. “Is it really as erotic as I’ve heard?”

Buffy bit her lip, aware that she was blushing to probably maroon stage seven. “Uh, can I plead the fifth or something?” she tried, aware of the vast flood of smug amusement from her vampire behind her.

To everyone’s surprise, Tara broke the resultant silence with a high-pitched giggle, though she abruptly cut off when everyone stared at her in amazement. “Sorry. I just… Sorry.” She retreated again, hiding behind her hair.

Willow jerked her gaze away from Tara, blushing almost as hard as Xander and biting her lip. “Uh, so  _ anyway _ …”

“They’ve claimed each other,” Giles broke in heavily, and the glasses were off. He sounded absolutely exhausted, pushed beyond the boundaries of thought and emotion. “As… mates.”

Xander reacted instantly once more. “Um,  _ excuse _ me?” he demanded, holding up one hand as if he were in class and asking a teacher for clarification.  _ “Mates?” _

“Yes.” Giles was shaking his head now, and, still half-blind, he tossed back his measure of scotch without the remotest genuflection toward anything like sipping. The whole third of a tumbler vanished in one fortifying gulp. “Oh Lord, Travers is going to have my head. One Slayer in service to a man who ran a hellmouth for hundreds of years then turned himself into a damned Old One, and who then ended up comatose and is now being ‘tutored back into good’ by a formerly-sociopathic vampire… and now one who’s got a penchant for sleeping with vampires and has decided to mate herself to William the damned Bloody, slayer of Slayers…” His shoulders were shaking.

Buffy bit her lip briefly to fight the urge to scream. /Try to see it as funny?/ “Maybe we can tell him I was doing research and I got carried away with my field work.”

Giles shot her a poisonous look before throwing himself backward into his chair. “Well, it isn’t as if they can fire me more. I’m already sacked. If they decide to assassinate us both, though, Buffy, I expect you to protect me along with yourself.”

Buffy frowned. That wasn’t a joke. Not even a little. “You’re not kidding.”

His eyes popped open again to pin her with a very certain, warning glare. “I’m not.”

“Wait, wait, wait; let’s just hold up for a second. Before we get into why the Council would assassinate their own Slayer for shacking up with a vampire—which, okay, yeah, I’m so not the happiest camper in the world about it, still, but even  _ I’ll  _ admit that’s a little extreme!—can anyone explain to me what this ‘claim’ thing is and why they’d be so pissed about the mate thing that they’d want to  _ kill _ you guys?” Xander looked frantic at this point, and his voice had ascended to a much higher than normal register; almost a falsetto. “I mean, why wouldn’t they just try to dust the vamp?” His head jerked over to Spike and he shrugged a little uncomfortably. “No offense, buddy. It’s just, if I had to pick between you and the Buffster, it’s her hands down, every time, and you’d think her own Watchers would say the same thing…” 

“No offense taken, Harris,” Spike growled, low and intense. “Rather dust than let any of those poxy buggers touch our girl.” He caught Buffy’s hand and dragged her back, ferocious in his need to touch, to be close, to protect. Buffy felt his primitive, desperate urge, knew it. She felt the same. No one was going to take her vampire from her. She went willingly, crushed his hands with hers where they rested, fierce and uncompromising, around her waist. “‘Specially ‘cause of me.”

“Stop.” It was one word, but Spike plugged up like she’d corked his mouth. It was so abrupt that it surprised them both. He made a faint strangled noise, and a surge of alarm shot through him to spark in her. She half-turned to regard him, touched his mouth, wondering. “What?”

He shook his head, schooling his expression, and buried his forehead between her shoulder blades. “Later,” he breathed, but something stunned and a little worried still flowed between them. 

/Ooookay./ Turning back to the room, Buffy sighed and moved to address her friends. “They’ll be mad because what Spike and I have done is permanent. They won’t be able to make me take it back or tear us apart. We’re in each other’s blood. It’s like…” She felt him twitch against her, felt the rush of certitude overwhelming that whatever-it-had-been, relaxed in relief. Her certainty surged up to match his. “It’s like a lifelong marriage. Let nothing put it asunder, because it’s blood-magick. Unbreakable. He has a pipeline to my soul and I have one to his immortality. Our…” How to put it? “Wild-sides aren’t going to let each other go for any money. They’re really primitive about mating stuff.”

Willow looked both super concerned and fascinated. “Is this part of that ‘essence of the First Slayer’ thing Giles was talking about last December? Because…”

“Yeah!” Xander broke in, sounding offended and confused. “Look, it doesn’t even make sense! I don’t care how much you’ve gotten in touch with your inner Slayer, Buffy; I don’t get how this can even  _ work _ , if only one of you is a…” His face twisted, glancing away from Spike and their obvious cuddliness. “I mean,  _ he’s _ a demon, but…”

Giles sighed. “Xander, please don’t be obtuse. You’ve felt Buffy’s power, no matter how you’ve tried to deny it. That is precisely what the essence of the First Slayer means; that Buffy also carries the essence of a demonic entity. The Slayer line was begun by infusing a human girl with a shadow-demon of unknown ori…”

“Wait, wait, hold up! Are you telling me that Buffy’s not  _ human?” _

Spike fielded that one, snorting indignantly around Buffy’s hair. “Oh, don’t be a pillock, Harris, a’ course she is! She’s just…” Smirking into her neck, he nuzzled at Buffy’s nape so that every part of her stood at attention; the parts in the front and the parts at the very back of her being. “…Augmented.” His hands drifted up to her waist, and he grasped her, pulling her firmly back against his ever-present erection, making her shiver. “Has to be, to keep up with us. Which makes it the hell of a thing keeping up with her, since she’s like us, but so bloody hot-blooded that it’s like fighting the sodding sun…” Nuzzle, nuzzle. “Dancing with open flame…” He nudged her, just a tiny bit, with his hips, and Buffy fought not to make noises that would completely give her away. 

Her eyes did flutter closed for a second, though, and her mouth fell open.

“Please have the decency to cease actual sex-play in my living room.” Giles sounded at his wits’ end. “I am, at this point, no longer blind, more’s the pity.”

/Okay, fair, but you have no idea how tough it is when you can feel each other’s everything./

Spike, of course, didn’t remotely possess the willingness to keep his thoughts quiet. “Ask a lot, Watcher, when you can feel everything your bird’s feelin’, and she can feel everything you’re feelin’. It’s like standin’ in the center of a cascade of mirrors, goin’ on forever. Reckon we won’t get much accomplished for a while till the novelty wears off.”

Willow’s mouth fell open in amazement. Buffy did some more blushing. Giles firmly set aside his glasses and groaned a little. “At any normal point in my life I would take this opportunity to quiz you at length as to how all this worked so I could get it down in my journals, but at this particular moment I am not precisely keen to explore the matter in any great depth…”

“Oh, don’t be a prude,” Anya broke in. “I’m awfully jealous. Is it just physical empathy, or is there a telepathic component as well? Because I would imagine that could get terribly claustrophobic.”

Buffy looked into her hands, avoiding everyone’s eyes. “Uh, more like emotional and, uh… sensations.” Cue more blushing. “So, um, it’s not telepathy. We mostly… Well, it’s stronger when we’re touching, and when we’re not it feels wrong, so we…”

The amusement in Spike’s voice made it clear that he’d rather be off somewhere experimenting than doing an exposition on the subject. He hated doing the ‘tractable vampire’ routine, but he did it for her. “Feel each other at a distance. Haven’t experimented yet with how far. Gets uncomfortable. We’ll let you know how far it goes once we can get ‘round to that, but don’t get your hopes up it’ll happen anytime soon.” He shot Willow a pointed look. “Empirical research isn’t as easy when the subjects aren’t cooperative.”

It was Willow’s turn to blush this time, at this reminder of her thwarted attempts over all last quarter to interview Spike about the chip she’d purloined from the Initiative doctors. She had done all kinds of poking and prodding at it with electrical impulses and stuff. She and Tara had even done some witchery over it, but in the end she had had to resort to questioning Spike, since without the leads the scientists had left dormant in his brain there was nothing trailing off the thing to send out sparks or whatever. She had been able to read certain bursts coming off of it, had found out important stuff like that it had settings—pulses, continuous firing, stuff like that—but less about what kind of output it had had and stuff. She had wanted to know what it had felt like. 

Spike had proved less than willing to relive the experience to give her scientific data.  _ “It hurt, Red,” he’d told her flatly. “Hurt like a bugger, put me on the ground sometimes, alright? Gave me nosebleeds, wrecked me so’s I didn’t want to get up again, often. Couldn’t, sometimes. Would rather starve than be in that kind of pain.”  _ His head had come up, and he’d riveted her with a fierce, blue glare. _ “D’ya know what that feels like? D’ya know what it feels like for a vamp to starve?” _

_ “No, I… Um… I mean, I guess it’s probably… uncomfortable, like with anyone…” _

_ “We lose life-force, witch. We dry out. We turn to husks, from the edges inward. You wanna know what it’s like to feel like you’re turnin’ into a soddin’ corpse while you’re still alive—or whatever you bloody wanna call it—while your every last remainin’ organ’s tryin’ to eat you and your every cell is screaming at you to take life to keep you alive because you can’t make life on your own?”  _

Buffy had had to turn away from the look on his face while Willow stammered out her response.

_ “Oh. Wow. I… No. I mean…” _

_ “It’s agonizing is what it is. And still I’d have rather that, in a low-grade sense, all the soddin’ time, livin’ on pig-swill, than risk that buggerin’ thing goin’ off. That should tell you something about how it felt.” _

_ “Wh… You always felt like that? Even when you were… being fed on blood?” _

Spike had snorted derisively. _ “If pigs were people, Buffy’d be just as miffed about me drinkin’ from Babe, yeah? Course I was starvin’ a bit all the soddin’ time!” _

/Oh God…/ Buffy had known by then, of course, that the blood wasn’t the same, hadn’t been giving him what he’d needed… but to have it spelled out like that, in such blatant terms, was agony. 

_ “But… It was blood! You had plenty of it…” _

_ “Can you use it for transfusions? Course not! ‘S not the same sort of blood, an’ no life left in it to boot, comin’ from the shops and long dead. Use your head, Red! You’re a bleedin’  _ scientist _!” _

_ “Oh.”  _ Wil had had the grace to look mildly ashamed at this comparison.

_ “Oh is right. That and knowin’ a manky human tosser havin’ a bad day could’ve beat me to half to death or even staked me and I could’ve done nothin’ to protect myself? Like those Initiative buggers, or even some kid on the street?”  _

It was an unspoken thing between them, but they all knew that of their intimates, Willow had come closest to guessing what had happened to Spike last year. She had looked away, nodded once, briefly, a faint wince playing around her eyes and mouth.  _ “Yeah, I guess that part must’ve really sucked, huh?”  _ she’d breathed.  _ “Feeling vulnerable like that?” _

_ “Could say that. Now get that soddin’ thing away from me.” _

If Buffy hadn’t desperately wanted to know enough to be sure that any lurking Initiative agents could never use the thing against her guy again, she would have marched right over, grabbed the chip from Wil’s hand, and crushed it under her boot heel.

Research was often bought with pain. /And we are not subjects in a study./ “We’ll let you know,” Buffy informed the rebel Watcher core quietly, “when there’s something to tell you. Till then, let’s focus on how we’re gonna deal with the Council.” She shot Giles a pointed glance. “Because we know they’re gonna come, once they hear.”

“Yes.” Giles cleared his throat. “Yes, quite. Ah… well. Quentin Travers is a by-the-book man, and thoroughly politically expedient. He will try to cow and bully you, Buffy, in order to bring you back to the party line. If that fails, and that swiftly, then his next course of action will be to see you… removed.” Xander gasped, outrageously loudly in the resultant quiet. Giles ignored him to speak flatly, well aware that Buffy had been prepared for this sort of rundown. “And since even in his current ignorance he will likely feel you are beyond saving with anything less than a full remediation program, it’s doubtful he’ll start with a conversation. Most likely he’ll come to you with a covering approach of strong talk, while a wetworks team moves in behind his back to remove Spike from the equation and then, while you are devastated from feeling his loss… to take you in for… reeducation. And that’s only if he does not find out about this mating bond, believes you’ve only made Spike a sort of a minion. If he does find out...”

/Find out that I’ve given William the Bloody that kind of a hold over their Slayer./

Buffy didn’t even want to think about how it would feel to be in the world without Spike; to feel his bond removed from her. Just, no. She would almost rather they  _ did _ find out about the claim. /Just come at me straight up and try to take me out too. Do your ‘start from scratch’ routine. But don’t you  _ dare _ try to take my mate from me./

Underneath her, Spike growled, low and threateningly, apparently much more offended by the idea of her possible ‘reeducation’ or the insult of an assassination attempt pointed in her direction than he was at the likelihood of his own demise. /Idiot./ Buffy patted his hand in reassurance, then covered it on her waist. “Pretty much what I figured when you started running interference and keeping them out of the loop.” Giles hadn’t much liked her hooking up with Spike, but he hadn’t gone running to his ex-bosses, for which she had to thank him. He preferred to deal with their problems family-style, to keep things in house. He trusted the Council even less than she did, probably because he knew them better than she ever could. 

The strain was telling on him, though. He had more lines on his face than he had this time last year. “Thank you, Giles,” she murmured, catching his eye. “For buying us the time to figure this out.”

He went briefly still, then nodded. “Of course, Buffy. It’s what I’m here for.”

“Which is why I’m really glad you are. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

A faint, pleased flush showed around the edges of his face, and his hard eyes took on that shy-smile cast that said he was pleased. 

Spike’s hands twitched at Buffy’s waist. She felt a surge of approval from him, hoped it would be enough. Spike had been worried about Giles all last summer, had told her more than once that he thought her Watcher was drinking a little too much, that he seemed lost.  _ “Bloke’s having a bit of a mid-life crisis, pet. Likely he doesn’t know where he fits anymore. You’ve gone past the place where most Slayers bite it. Dunno if he’s prepared to see you through where his training ends and you’re off living life, when all the book tells him is to keep you from doin’ it. He’s got no job, no standing, lookin’ for meaning in the bottom of a bottle all too often. Thinks you don’t need him anymore. Might want to find a bit of something for him to do, yeah?” _

Luckily, Jonathan’s arrival into the gang had given Giles a little bit of a hobby—baby man-witch guidance—which had kind of spurred a little bit more random guidance of Willow, who was seriously getting way stronger now she and Tara were joining hands on a regular basis. The two girls had jumped at the chance for more magicks classes—for anything magicks-related, really—and Giles and Jonathan’s little tutoring sessions had become a small casting-circle once or twice a week at Giles’ apartment. Willow was always raving about it in the dorm, whenever Buffy was actually there; talking about how the guidance and the regular discipline of the group work was helping her to mold all the instinctive stuff she did and to channel it into certain avenues. A lot of talk about ‘drawing from the earth’ and ‘the handrails of natural laws’ and ‘the karma of the threefold return’, whatever the hell that meant. 

_ “She has more raw, instinctive power on tap than I ever had, will ever have.” _ Giles had sounded amazed when he’d said it.  _ “Joining hands with her when we turned the earth against the Hellions… I knew she was talented, but seeing it like that, touching it… And since then, since she met Tara, began working with her… She needs guidance, or Lord knows where she’ll end up, exploring things on her own.”  _ A pained wince.  _ “I never want her to end up doing… the things I’ve done in my past because I had no one to tell me how incredibly dangerous they were, what the repercussions could be.”  _

“Maybe we can do a spell to confuse whoever they send,” Wil was suggesting. Leaning eagerly forward, she touched Tara’s hand as if seeking affirmation, then caught Jonathan’s eye. “The four of us could start something; five if Anya wants to help. She’s really knowledgeable.” Anya preened. “A confusion spell or something. Some protective thing or a binding against any wetworks team. Then all you’d have to deal with would be the tweed-wearers.”

Tara was nodding thoughtfully. “Defensive magicks are w…worth considering, Buffy.”

Buffy smiled at the girls. “That’d be great.” Caught Jonathan’s eye to include the quiet boy. “You okay with helping with that?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. W… we could…” He lifted his gaze to his compatriots, clearly ill at ease at having been addressed directly.

“We’ll look into it, Willow finished for him, firm and sure.

“Excellent,” Giles wrapped, and glanced over at Xander. “You could run interference with your mouth alone, Xander. At the best of times your prattle creates confusion.”

“Uh, thanks?” Xander straightened, looking confused. “You want me to…”

Spike was smirking. “He wants you and Vengeance to do your thing. You lead in, yeah, rattle on about something with me or the Slayer, then she pops in with some anecdote from the eleventh century, then you get into a bit of a tussle over it, distract the lot for a while. Take the tension off whenever things get a bit heated.”

“Oh.” Xander shot a glance at Anya. “We could do that, right? We do that all the time anyway.”

Anya looked mildly anxious. “If you don’t think they’ll target me as well. Though I suppose with Buffy having mated herself to a Master vampire, they’ll have other fish to fry.” She finally nodded assent. “If all else fails and they’re focusing too much on Buffy and Spike and their sex lives, we can just talk about ours. Everyone seems to find that highly unnerving.”

“Ahn _ , I _ find that highly unnerving.”

“You shouldn’t, you know. When a woman brags about her satisfaction, it reflects well on her bed partner. And that’s you, whatever else we are to each other. You should be gratified.”

Xander subsided, blushing furiously.

Giles cleared his throat loudly. “Once the, ah, enforcers are dealt with, we’ve only to manage to find some way to deal with Quentin. Which is a formidable enough task in its own right…”

Buffy shook her head. “No problem. I have that jerk’s number.”

Giles blinked. “Buffy, I hardly think we should discount the head of the Council as some sort of pushover. He isn’t likely to take this lying down.”

“No,” she answered, coming to her feet with her hand still in her vampire’s, “but nothing and nobody’s getting between me and Spike. And we’re all stronger together than any of us is apart. Way stronger than any Council asshole who thinks drugging high school girls to keep them under control is a fun pastime.” And okay, maybe she was still a little pissed off about her Cruciamentum. She would hold onto that rage, funnel it, use it to power herself in the upcoming confrontation. “So let ‘em come. And I will  _ bury _ them.” Giles leaned away, looking awed at her tight-lipped expression. But that was the thing. This lesson was the same one she had had to bring to her own team’s attention last winter. That was apparently just practice, and now it was time to bring it to a larger stage. “There’s dozens of Watchers. They’re the disposable ones; walking libraries with the field experience of children in Sunday school. But there’s only  _ one _ me. Trained, honed, ready.” All their eyes were riveted on hers now, and she felt it; that ancient power, flaring through her like a guided torrent. “Maybe it’s time they remembered that.”

“Damn right, love,” Spike breathed, staring at her from his seat in the chair.

“That,” Giles murmured in low tones, “is precisely what they’re afraid of.”

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
And we've set up the stuff.  
  



	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry... I got behind in here. RL has been a real beyotch lately. My bad. Really apologize. Will catch you all up with another chapter after this shortly.
> 
> So... trying to think of what's in this chapter to warn for. I guess... mild warning for discussion of past traumas (sort of in a roundabout way), in keeping with what happened in the previous fic, because I dig continuity and honoring where this couple came from.   
> Hm. Oh, and CW for someone recounting the kind of damage that happens when body piercings are removed abruptly and incorrectly.   
> Hm. Rather interesting discussion about unexpected consent / boundaries stuff...
> 
> I think that's it.   
> Oh, and a little moment in here people probably thought they'd never get in this fic, because I'm a non-linear storyteller.   
> *EVEG*  
> Let us all give a HUZZAH for wolf_shadoe, for generally being awesome!

“You were bloody brilliant in there, Buffy.”

His face was buried in her neck, his unneeded breath cool and arousing on her skin as she danced with him down the steps, toward the DeSoto. Wrestled the door open behind him, shoved him unceremoniously in and crawled in after him to clamber in over his body as he scooted backward on the worn vinyl and looked up at her in awe. “Sodding goddess.”

“How fast can you get us back to the crypt?”

He jerked his head once, a swift denial. Not fast enough for either of them. “Due to meet Mum anyway, at the galle…”

Nodding to forestall him, she yanked up the seat-release. 

Cut off mid-reminder, he toppled back with it, all of the bench-back falling to the rear save for the tiny segment reserved for the driver. Who was, at the moment, at her mercy, his head falling to land in the back seat with a dull  _ thwuuck _ . 

_ “Well,” _ he murmured, looking up at her in deep appreciation. “Look who’s back in the back seat…”

“I really like your car.”

He grinned broadly as she shoved the duster off his shoulders. “Thought you said it was a heap.” He shrugged it off, peeling his arms free, and twitched his fingers at her in invitation. 

“Well, you know.” Buffy stripped her halter off, threw it over the steering wheel, and lay over him with a sigh. “I was young and dumb and didn’t appreciate the perks that came with a classic model.”

He snorted and slipped clever, knowledgeable fingers under the clasp of her bra. “Get the feeling we’re not talking about the car anymore.”

“You’re right.” Shoving his t-shirt up, she dipped her head to his right nipple. 

“Fuck, Buffy… Don’t care anymore, do you, that the kiddies are gonna come… Christ! Piling out of the flat at any… Hell! Moment, and…” He bucked a little beneath her, knocking her briefly away from her single-minded pursuit.

“No. The windows are blacked out.” It was endlessly fascinating, feeling him. This, for instance, felt different for him than it did for her, but still really good. The sensation didn’t head straight south, the way it did for her when he did this. It more just sort of radiated all around, and… And she could probably spend the next year or so playing with this new toy that was shared sensation. 

Her tongue found the little scars around behind the nipple, and this time she just couldn’t stand it. She had avoided asking for months, in case it was a bad story, but… “Is this…”

“Mmmm?” He wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to her words. “Christ, pet, gonna need some instructions here. How long before…” His hips jerked toward her, still firmly encased in too-tight jeans.

She pulled away a little, brushed the damp nub with her finger. “These little scars. Is that a bad story?”

Arrested, he frowned, and then his face cleared and he tugged her up very abruptly to meet his mouth, kissed her long and deeply enough that she forgot her inquiry for a moment. When she struggled away for breath, he smiled into her eyes, just twinkling away and looking delighted with her. “Barbells.”

“Huh?” She was so lost.

“Had ‘em pierced for a bit, pet, back in my heavy Punk days. Was a bit of alright, ‘cept…” The twinkles vanished abruptly.

Buffy was still lost in the shocking and yet somehow alluring image of a Spike with pierced nipples. “Except…”

He looked away with a little shrug. “Once when she was brassed at me over something the pixies said to her, Dru ripped ‘em right out. Said they didn’t fit me anymore because I was on my way to the light or some such rot, and metal didn’t burn.” He made a twisted sort of face. “Didn’t feature to put ‘em back in after. Too convenient a way to get damaged, I reckoned, so…”

Buffy winced. “Ow, much?”

“Yeah, well.” He shrugged about as much as anyone could who was horizontal. “Lot of fun when you handle ‘em right. Not as much when you handle ‘em wrong.”

“I bet.” Buffy bit her lip, afraid to ask, especially since the unexpected conversation was kind of a mood-killer, but… “When…”

“Eighty-one. In the winter, too, which made it the hell of a lot worse. Was cold as bloody fuck, out in the sodding streets in Merry Old after a Pistols show, snowing an’ the lot. Ever have cold, lacerated nipples rubbin’ on a shirt made of safety pins, pet?”

Buffy didn’t want to imagine that, but she was more concerned with the chill he had induced by his first words than his last. “Winter of eighty-one? Like, the early end, or the other end?”

“Early. Was after Christmas. January sometime. Know that for sure, ‘cause I was gonna give myself the gift of a new set once I healed, but figured not to, considerin’.”

_ “Said they didn’t fit me anymore because I was on my way to the light...” _

Buffy felt very far away for a second. “I was born in January of eighty-one.” 

Spike went all vampire-statue. “Oh, bloody fuck.”

“She knew.” Not a question.

“Christ.” He closed his eyes, lifted up, rolling his body till his forehead was pressed to hers. “Even then. Oh, bloody hell, love.”

He had been hers. From the moment she had been born, he had been hers, and marking time till she had been ready for him. Oh god… “Just, really, wow.”

“Yeah,” he breathed, sounding as thrown as she felt. “Christ, no wonder she was hell on wheels that whole month.” He sounded seriously awed by the realization. “Left me standin’ in the soddin’ corner once for a day and a half, tellin’ me I’d been a bad doggie because I didn’t belong to her anymore, and I was a forsworn knight. Load of rubbish. I’d been loyal to her for a bloody century.”

Buffy frowned, confused. “Left you standing in the corner? What?”

“Yeah, well…” Sliding his hand absently into her nape, Spike pulled her back down to his chest. “Used a sire-command on me, innit? Couldn’t move a bloody muscle till she released me.”

Buffy jerked up and away for a second time to stare at him in confusion. “A sire…”

Azure eyes regarded her starkly. “Something you should know about now, Buffy, in order to have a care, since you can use them on me now we’re claimed, and you’ve the upper hand in that little circuit. Already felt the pull to do what you’ve told me to do these last few months since you took me on, but it’s stronger now; a lot sodding stronger. When you told me to hush earlier…” His expression turned rueful, and he sighed a little, sounding almost philosophical about it. “I couldn’t have gotten a word out edgewise if you’d paid me. Not unless you changed your mind and gave me leave to speak.”

Horror lanced through Buffy’s stomach. “Wh… No, I…  _ No!” _

The solemn blue of his eyes started to twinkle a little. “We haven’t had to use safewords yet, love, but I’m thinkin’ we might start needin’ ‘em in bed, with this, the way you tend to pop off with demands without thinking, or I’ll end up bein’ your personal property. Not that I don’t all but wear a soddin’ collar, but it’d be nice to be able to say something to let you know I’m of a mind to ask a bit of respite here and there as part of my conditions of servitude.”

/Oh, God./ Dismay hit her, followed by a vast wall of dread that hollowed her belly, made her shake. /No./. If she said something, he had to do it. /Oh  _ God _ ./ “I didn’t want… I didn’t ask for… Dammit, Spike, why didn’t you  _ tell _ me this could happen?” 

His mouth twisted a little, and he tightened, just slightly, around the eyes. “Didn’t occur to me till it happened, Buffy. It’s a different sort of bond, innit? And I wasn’t thinking all that clearly. We both wanted the rest, and we went and did it, and now we’ve all of it. This is just part and parcel.”

Buffy closed her eyes and swallowed hard, fighting not to go into a panic attack. “Do you think it’s at least… mutual? Like, can you… do it to me? Because we’re both…” That would at least make it better in her mind, if he could also do the same. Not that she wanted him to be able to… command her. Not to do  _ anything _ . After the Master, after Angel, after the hospital, after her Cruciamentum… After so many blows to her sense of self, she found the very thought invasive, frightening, and not a little bridling. But it was equally terrifying, not to mention horribly unfair that she could do it to him... so at least if it was a two-way street, then they could both equally avoid it, or… something.

“‘Magine not, love,” Spike answered, sounding somewhere between semi-resigned and almost… what was that word he used? ‘Flip’, as he twitched his fingers up and away from himself, like he was dismissing the possibility. “It’s a vamp thing, yeah? Vamps run on a hierarchy…”

/No!/ “Tell me to do something!”

He rolled his eyes skyward. “Bloody hell, Buffy.”

“I need to know.” /For so many reasons.../

He sighed heavily, sounding deeply unconvinced, and shrugged one shoulder. “Right. Say something to me, pet.”

/God, what.../ “Spike, I want you to…”

“Shut your beautiful gob, Slayer.” It came out with a snap, though he sounded thoroughly amused to even be uttering the words.

For her part, Buffy found herself almost gaping to hear him say such a thing to her. She stared, startled… and found herself torn between stunned, amused, and mildly irritated, like she kind of wanted to pop him on the nose for it. 

She definitely, she realized a little belatedly, felt zero urge to ‘obey’ him. “Oh, God,” she whispered.

His expression remained unchanged; still rueful and resigned, if with that twitch at the corner of his mouth that said he found the whole thing darkly amusing. “Could’ve told you as much, love. Someone’s got to be on top. Just the way it works.” He reached out, lightly caressed her bangs away from her eyes, looking absolutely unsurprised and certainly not all that alarmed while she swirled ever deeper into horror. “I gave myself to you first. I’m utterly yours. Not surprising that it came out this way…”

“So… I’m not also yours?” she heard herself ask, and was not at all surprised to hear her voice sound small, to hear it shaking. “I thought, when we…”

“Oh, you’re mine as well, Buffy,” he answered softly, and his fingers drifted down to brush ever so lightly over his bite, making her shiver involuntarily. “You’re bound to me and I’m bound to you and that’ll never change. But that’s a different matter altogether to who stands where in the power structure.” 

“Oh my God…” Buffy bit her lip and jerked away from his touch, absolutely aghast and veering swiftly toward panicked. “I could hurt you and not even know it. I could make you…”

He caught her, seizing her arms in both hands. “No, pet. You wouldn’t do that. Not with the way we’ve begun. That’s what I’m sayin’. Though I reckon to prove it to you we’ll likely need a word I can say—and probably best all round if you have one as well, just to be proper about it—so you know for sure I’m right with what’s happening, and we’ll be fine.”

She tugged her bicep out of his grip, struggled away. “And what if I’ve told you to hush again or something?” she demanded, ferocious in her fear. “What if I think I’m doing something you want, and I think it’s all fun and romantic, and it turns out I’m taking advantage, or abusing you, or…”

“Buffy, stop. Please.” 

She bit her lip and cut off, breathing hard. Waited, avoiding his eyes.

“Then we’ll have a gesture as well, love, alright?” He lifted a hand, hesitated long enough for her to see it, acknowledge it, then cupped her cheek briefly, stroked her bangs out of her eyes. “You think we’re the first people to ever have to deal with this sort of thing?”

Her eyes shot up, caught him in a glare. “I’m pretty sure most people don’t have to deal with vamp-commands, no matter how kinky they get, dammit!”

He sighed heavily and turned his head away, muscles taut. “This is because of what happened the first time, innit?”

/Weeell…/

The thing was, their first serious time together had been wonderful. Amazing. Beautiful and gorgeous and fun and sexy and healing, and basically everything Buffy could have ever dreamed. It had completely lived up to advertising. Spike had absolutely been worth the wait, in every conceivable way, and then some. Everything had been fantastic, except for that one little glitch. 

_ She had tired of the gentle, teasing stroking of her thigh and, wrapping her arms around his neck, yanked him down atop her, on the bed. “Can we just start where we left off when Giles came in? I’m starting to seriously worry that there’s a curse on us or something. We need to make up for lost time, stat.” _

_ He’d laughed. “Pet, nothing about what I want to do with your lovely self has anything remotely to do with quick. But I understand the sentiment.” He’d kissed her, long and slow and deeply enough to reset her anxious frame of mind, her buzzing body, then lifted away to smile that boyish smile she loved so much. “We’re bound to get a break one of these days. Maybe this is it. Barring a three-alarm fire, more earthquakes, or a new demon busting down the door…” _

_ “Don’t! Stop saying things! Just come here!” And she’d hurriedly stripped off his shirt. _

_ They’d proceeded to mostly-naked with swift economy, if only out of deference to Buffy’s urgency, but Spike, while finishing her quick work with his jeans, had stepped away. “Hold that thought, love. Got to do something.” And he’d headed to the dresser top to pick up Mr. Gordo… and turned him around backward. “There. Since you insisted on bringing the pig home for the holidays…” _

_ “Wh…” _

_ Coming back to the bed, he’d hitched down his jeans, grinning at her, and kicked them aside to leave her arrested for a long moment by the sight of his lean, well-muscled form. Fed for a couple of weeks on human blood, and having had a quick stoup of Slayer to start him off on the road to recovery in the last fortnight, he was looking mighty fine compared to his hollow self post-captivity. Not that she had allowed herself to assess the goods in any great detail, what with one thing and another, before this moment. “Getting a nice eyeful, Slayer?” _

_ “You look… good.” /Understatement much, Buffy? How about you tell the wordy guy something a little more flattering and accurate, like, you know, maybe, ‘freaking gorgeous’, or ‘goddamn amazing’?/  _

_ He seemed to take it in the spirit it was offered, though, giving the air a little sniff and grinning. “Nice to know I inspire your ardor there, Slayer.” _

_ “Oh, shut up.” _

_ “You look nice as well, you. Wouldn’t mind seeing more of you.” He’d prowled closer, clearly amused by her blush. _

_ “Uh…” she’d stammered, briefly overwhelmed by his insanely attractive nakedness as he had arched over her body. She was only wearing a bra and undies, and was acutely aware of that fact. “Why the thing with Mr. Gordo?” she’d blurted, feeling unaccountably nervous. Unbidden, her hand had slipped up to brush along his washboard stomach, the backs of her fingers sliding up to his chest.  _

_ He’d inhaled sharply when she’d flipped it over to palm his nipple. “Used to shag with a dozen dolls watching me, pet, their eyes all glittering.” A faint note of discomfort etched his tone. “Would rather not do it now with piggy-wiggy eyeing my arse winkin’ at it while I go to. Christ, your hand’s hot, love.” _

_ His words had jerked her away, very briefly, both from her minor embarrassment at his naked proximity and his very gratifying reaction to her barely-there touch. /Okay, trauma much?/ “Dolls?” _

_ “Never mind, my love.” Dipping, he’d moved to kiss her neck, her throat, making her tremble. “Want to get you naked, Buffy, feel you against me.” _

_ She wanted that too. God, she did, and lifted up inarticulately for him to slip his hand beneath her to find the clasp of her bra. He’d done so with remarkable one-handed skill, leaving her very promptly pressed against his hard chest, and alright, they had just progressed further than they ever had before. He was really, really cool against her nipples, and it made her feel even more overheated than she had already felt five seconds ago. The words slipped out before she could censor them. “God, I missed this.” _

_ And she’d bitten her lip, feeling like she had crossed a line, but dammit, she’d been with who she’d been with, and they both knew it, and… _

_ To her surprise, Spike had chuckled, tugging her close again. “Sex at all, or the temperature contrast? ‘Cause I don’t half blame you on the former, with all you have to do and no outlet beyond your hand, but if it’s the latter…” A faint shadow crossed his face, and was swiftly put aside. “We imprint on what we imprint on, love. Reckon you weren’t satisfied in the same way by the human lad.” _

_ She’d turned her face briefly away. “Sorry, I shouldn’t’ve…” _

_ “Shh. It’s bound to come up. We both have pasts.” _

_ Way too intertwined ones. Oh God, she hadn’t thought of that; or at least she’d tried not to. But he’d been with Drusilla for a hundred-plus years. Obviously she’d learned to satisfy him in ways that someone with Buffy’s (lack of) experience couldn’t begin to… _

_ “Hush.” He’d stroked her cheek. “I’ll reassure you right now before you worry about it, that whatever went on for me in the past, it doesn’t compare to the heat between us. Apples and oranges anyway.” He’d grinned then. “And as for the other… I’m planning on seeing to it that you feel the same way posthaste.” _

_ “Oh jeez.” _

_ He’d sobered, eyes darkening to indigo on hers. “As to the rest, long as names don’t come into it, for either of us, I think we’ll be fine.” _

_ “Deal.” /Such a deal./ _

_ “Right then.” And he’d scraped blunt teeth over her collarbone… and then lowered his mouth to her nipple. “Hold onto somethin’, love, and feel free to let me know what you like or don’t. Don’t need to spare my feelings, yeah? I want you to act like a soddin’ air traffic controller. Grab my hair and drag me around wherever you want me to go. I’m all yours.” _

_ “Oh my God…” _

_ Grinning, he’d dropped his mouth, chilly and perfect, and set to work while she arched in shock beneath him. Because his tongue was already doing  _ things _ , crazy thrummy things that were sending shocks straight south. He was making her jumpy and making her make noise, and no one had ever gotten her this… This antsy just by… Like, when Parker had done this it had been nice and everything, but then he’d gone straight from there to a little fingering, and then they’d headed directly to the main event. And with Angel, there had been a lot of this, and it had been languorous and loving, with a lot of touching and stroking and looking into each other’s eyes, and then the joining and the moving together, but it had never felt like this; never built up this swift, raw, fierce, physical need. “Spike, I…” She was going to climb out of her skin, was mildly embarrassed to find that her hips were already pressing against him. _

_ Grinning against her—she could feel it—he switched… but did not relent, fingers moving to the recently-vacated nipple to… Was he doing the same thing with his fingers as his mouth…  _ How?  _ “Spike, I can’t…” She’d given up the battle, no longer cared that she couldn’t still her hips, was now seeking pressure for the ache he had started, and couldn’t he just… “Spike…” _

_ Wait. He’d said she should… _

_ Grabbing his head, she shoved him south, hard. She felt like a wanton nympho doing it, but she seriously couldn’t help it. _

_ And then his hands were gripping her hips, and he was looking up at her, his chin in her navel. And to her amazement, he looked… proud. “That’s my girl,” he’d told her softly, and started kissing his way down along her belly.  _

_ And then… /Oh,  _ fuck!/

_ Grabbing the pillow out from under her head, she threw it away, seized a handful of blankets, and bore down for the ride. _

_ She hadn’t known what to expect. Like, not even a little bit. The fact of the matter was, she had thought she would have been too embarrassed by the situation to get off for a while.  _

_ What actually happened was she came about three times in as many minutes, which might have been attributable to Spike’s prowess, or to her terrible need, or a combination of the two, but either way, it was probably a good thing he didn’t need oxygen to keep his unlife, because he was no doubt in danger of drowning otherwise.  _

_ Eventually she slowed down enough to actually parse what the hell he was doing as individual sensations, found herself rocking toward his mouth. “I need,” she heard herself sobbing, “I need… God, Spike, I need…” _

_ “I’m here, love,” he’d answered, and slipped a finger inside of her; and dammit, she’d convulsed, almost came again right there.  _

_ “More, please, more…” _

_ Another, pressing… something, and that was it, and she’d had some kind of orgasm she’d never had before, and at that point she’d found herself babbling probably absolute nonsense at him and reaching for him, clawing air. At which point he had, thank god, taken pity and moved up to join her. “Christ, the feel of you, comin’ so hard…” He’d sounded vibrant, admiring, a touch regretful. “S’pose I can spend more time later. Seems you’ve other needs at mo’ pet.” _

“Please…”

_ Feeling him nudge her opening all cool and perfect had nearly driven her out of her damn mind, and she’d lost all control of her body. It had been too long. Her legs had spasmed around him of their own accord and dragged him in with an abrupt suddenness that had shocked them both. Then, wide-eyed and stunned, they’d halted together, staring into one another’s eyes, she gasping and open-mouthed and he much the same, but breathless. “Bloody fuck, Buffy; your quim’s like fire, oh Christ…” And he’d twitched; just a little. It hadn’t even counted as a thrust; just a little adjustment. _

_ She’d come again, just from that. And she’d tried to hold back, remembering Parker, how it had hurt him, how when she’d come it had made Angel go all game face… but she just couldn’t. It had completely caught her by surprise. _

_ “Oh fuck, oh Christ, oh Jesus fuck, oh hell… I didn’t know, oh fuck, Buffy…” _

_ “Nnn… I’m sorry… did I… hurt you?” She couldn’t stop, even her feet were curling, but… _

_ Seizing her butt in both hands, he’d lifted her up, stared blazing into her eyes. “Hurt me, hell. I’m gonna make you come so many bleeding more times, Slayer! That was sodding amazing! Holy fuck!” _

_ And she could breathe again. “It didn’t…” He thrust deep, making her grunt, pulled out. “…Hurt you?” _

_ He had lost control of his movements, was thrusting madly into her and chanting; and it was so. Damn. Good. “Christ… if that… counts as… hurting… I’ll ask you… to hurt me… all bloody… night! Oh Christ, Buffy!” And the expression of feral pleasure in his eyes, on his face, was no lie. And the savage abandon with which he had driven into her had made her coil around him, brought out some insane part of her that had her shoving her hands up against the wall to brace herself; had her wrapping her legs around somewhere like maybe his ribs, so that his impacts felt like they were in her throat or something, and okay, yes, she came yet again before the end, deep inside, chills running all through her body in waves while he ground out some kind of massive, groaning orgasm along with her, moaning something about ‘the hot, punishing fist of her cunt’ and how amazing it was, which language she probably would have found horrifying before that day but in that moment she had had nothing left but ‘limp’. _

_ Later, in the haze, she had drawn her fingers up and down his back and butt, stroking him. She felt sleepy, but the idea of falling out in his arms was, of course, terrifying. Best to prolong things. Not that she wasn’t otherwise motivated. “So, when do I get to play the same game on you? You know, where you’re the air traffic controller and you tell me all the things you like?” _

_ “Mmmm… Give me a few more minutes, pet, then I’m all yours.” He’d nuzzled into her neck. “Bloke needs a mo’ and maybe a fag, after having the shag of his life.” _

_ /The shag of your…/ Something warm flooded her, relaxing her body and chasing away a few of her fears. /Does that mean maybe you’ll… be here in the morning?/  _

_ Biting her lip, hating herself for being insecure, she still couldn’t stifle the words. “Does that mean that I’m… worth a second go?” _

_ He’d pulled away abruptly and groaned, hands going to her face to cradle her. They were warm from her body, and the way he’d stared into her eyes had riveted her. His gaze had been filled with so much regret that she had been floored by it. “Bloody hell. I’m so sodding  _ sorry _ , Buffy. Do you know why I said that?” _

_ She’d looked away. “Because he… Because they all…” _

_ “No. Sod that. Look at me. Please?” _

_ Bringing her gaze back to his had been the toughest thing she had probably ever had to do. _

_ Touching her beneath the eye where one traitorous tear had managed to escape her custody, he’d shaken his head. “Fuck, I could saw off my tongue. Buffy, I said it because I was jealous, alright? I wanted you, and  _ he’d _ had a go and I knew I’d never get one; and then that little pissant of a college brat got a ride, and you’d never look at  _ me _ that way, and I just…” _

_ She blinked at him. “What? You…” _

_ He sobered, touching her lips. “And now to know you took it to bloody heart, when  _ look _ at you. You shag like a goddess. Never thought you’d believe a single word I said. And besides; why  _ would _ you believe it?” _

_ She’d looked away again. “Because they…” And faltered. _

_ “Yeah, well… Their problem, not yours. Bleedin’ idiots, not to hold onto you.” _

_ To her horror, she’d sniffled. _

_ “Oh, hell. C’mere, love.” And pulling her close, he’d rocked her against him, wrapped her up tight. “You could hold me ensorcelled till the end of time, Buffy.” _

_ Reaching out tentatively, she had begun to stroke him once more; as if attempting to reassure herself that he was real. “And when I wake up… you’ll still be here?” _

_ He’d trembled slightly, and it had taken her a moment to realize that he was chuckling. “Love, you’d have to kick me out of bed to be rid of me.” _

_ “Oh.” /Wow./ Her strokes coming longer, she’d felt some long-held, heavy weight lifting from her being. “I love you so much.” _

_ “Well, that’s fair enough, seeing as I love you to distraction as well, you mad chit.” _

_ Burying her face in his shoulder, she’d continued her stroking, he doing the same to her. They’d gone on with that for a while, refamiliarizing themselves with the ease of moments before and getting to know the terrain of one another’s bodies. She had finally relaxed into the moment when, sliding up along the globe of his rear, her fingers slipped along to touch him a little just behind his balls, at the bud of his ass. And he’d tensed, jumped a little, and completely tightened up. And very forcibly relaxed himself. _

_ She’d stilled immediately. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I…” _

_ “No. It’s fine, Buffy. You just took me by surprise.” _

_ “Sorry, I should’ve asked if anywhere was a no-fly zone, or…” _

_ He’d caught her other hand, at the moment cupped against his chest, drilled his eyes into hers. “It’s fine. I’m fine, with a bit of warning. I just wasn’t paying any attention; or at least, not the right kind of attention. And probably with a little time it’ll pass. It always has before…” _

_ She’d winced. _

_ Eyes pinning hers with fierce patience, demanding her attention. “Buffy. I’ve been here. There are things I enjoy, and will again, given time. Just… let me work through them, yeah? And… don’t… run away?” _

_ She’d bitten her lip. “I don’t know how to… not screw up.” _

_ His expression was open, eyes warm on hers. “I’ll let you know.” _

As freakouts went, it hadn’t exactly been huge. It also hadn’t been the only one. 

And he had never hidden them from her. They had worked through them all, together. So while she wanted to say it wasn’t what this was about, and that it didn’t haunt her, the truth was that it did a little. And, dammit, she couldn’t lie. They had always had truth between them, after all, and to break that… “I know you’d tell me,” she said softly, instead. “It’s just… what if you can’t?”

When he answered, his voice was tight. “And if I ever sparked something in you that brought anything back? If we were ever to get playful and rough, and I had you quick against a wall somewhere, and you remembered what happened with the Boy, or if sometime when I had my hand on your cunny and you flashed back to that sonofabitch who touched you as a wee chit, would you tell me, or just get on?”

She hesitated.

Shifting out from under her, Spike made a sound that she knew was an exasperated curse and slid aside, over to the upright driver’s side seat. Shoved a hand hard through his hair until it was in disarray. “Bloody hell, Buffy.”

/Damn, damn, dammit./ “Okay, look. It’s not like it’s even the same thing…”

Wrong thing to say, and he turned on her, eyes shooting blue fire. She was blindsided when a surge of rage hit her; so powerful it almost knocked her down. “If you treat me like a fucking victim, Buffy, I will get out of this car right now and walk away.”

/God, oh shit, fuck…/ “I’m sorry, damn, that’s not what I… You know I say the wrong things, that’s not what I meant, I’m sorry?” Panic was making her babble.

Breathing as hard now as she was, Spike gripped the steering wheel like his fingers were about to break, stared straight ahead. “Tell me how you think it’s different, dammit.”

/Oh, shit./ She was going to hyperventilate, she was going to pass out, and part of it was right now she couldn’t tell how much of what she was feeling was her emotions, and how much of it was his; anger so white-hot it made her vibrate, twining with her own terror to make a nauseous mix. “I just meant… maybe it’s easier to differentiate because… those things didn’t actually… happen, you know? Progress very far? So I can push them away? Or, I dunno, that’s just how it’s been so far, and maybe I’m just imagining how things are for you, because I don’t know; I haven’t felt you yet, but… God, I probably sound like an idiot, and I was trying to be sensitive and I didn’t mean to be… whatever. I was just saying that I wouldn’t be trying to lie to you or to be Miss Strong, all powering through, but that it just… comes and goes, you know, and it’s not a big thing. I’ve put it away, and I dunno if you… I dunno if that’s what you do or if you even  _ can _ , and I’m just really scared that if this thing is piled on top of it…” She trailed off, terrified that she had made things worse by trying to explain.

Silence fell between them, with Spike still and unbreathing for so long that she was sure she had ruined everything. Terrors ran through her, like, /Now that we’re bonded, what does it mean if he wants to leave me? How does that work, if I’ve messed up so bad that he decides to leave…/

And then he came to life beside her. “Then I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you that it’s just the same, love. If something happens to remind me, I still myself and I let it pass. I center myself and remember that I’m with  _ you _ , and that I’m safe. I breathe in your scent, and listen to your heartbeat, and feel your heat, and know where I am. And because you’re still with me every time, I know I can take as long as I need.” His eyes burned on hers then, fierce azure flame. “Which you can’t do for your part if you don’t tell me, so you can’t take the sodding time to center back to being with me. I bloody don’t want those buggers in bed with us, so if you haven’t been telling me, then for all I know, they’ve sodding well been there!”

/Oh, shit.../ “They haven’t,” she hastened to reassure him. “I promise. It’s… what’s the word? Fleeting. Barely even there. Like you said; I smell you and feel you and you’re cool and they weren’t, and you don’t have a heartbeat and they did, and when you breathe, the way you breathe isn’t the same, and neither of them smoked or drank whiskey or… God, I’m probably not making any sense, but it’s so easy to stay with you that I can’t even… No one at all in my world smells or tastes or feels like you, so I have no problem staying with you,  _ ever _ .”

After a long moment he gave her a grudging nod. “Alright. I suppose I can understand that, since I’ve seldom been hurt by a woman, and that, not a warm one with a heartbeat.”

She definitely didn’t want to ask what Drusilla and/or Darla might ever have done to him. “I’m sorry that I didn’t ever speak up. If you want me to I will, but it didn’t seem like a thing.” She felt ashamed now, in retrospect. “Though, I mean, now you’ll probably feel it if it happens again, ever.” She felt a weird half-laugh escape her. “I bet if I ever dated another human guy I would’ve had a lot more issues, whether he ever noticed or not. On top of getting a bunch of new ones about my strength and thinking I was a freak.”

He snorted. “No doubt you’d’ve trained yourself not to come at all, love; or at least, not properly, else you’d’ve crippled the poor lads. Which is a soddin’ shame, because watchin’ you let yourself go is a bleedin’ wonder.”

They were getting far afield. “I’m scared, Spike. I’m not gonna not be scared about this. I don’t want it.”

He stilled, and his hand rose to stroke her cheek. “I know, pet. And your reaction alone is enough to let me know how safe I am with you. But in the meantime, let’s come up with those words, innit? Tell you what. You hear me say…” He faltered, grinding to a halt.

“What?”

He shot her an exasperated look. “Give me a mo’ to think of something, yeah? Bit put on the spot. Never had a safety-word before. Idiotic for a vampire to even consider such a thing, most times…”

In other words, he was doing this more for her peace of mind than for his own, because vampires were insane.

“S’posed to be something you’ll not say otherwise, ‘specially in those circumstances…” he went on thoughtfully. 

Buffy frowned, struggling to stick with the conversation, to keep it light. “Well, crap. I’m gonna have a hard time thinking of anything too, then.”

Spike’s head popped up, eyes like gimlets in the dim light of the cab. “Euchered.”

“Huh?”

“Means ‘done in, at the end of your tether’.”

“Okay?”

“Never mind, pet. It’s from an old card game as went out of style long before you were born. And if I can’t speak I’ll hold my palms up before me. Alright, then?”

She blinked at him, nonplussed.

“Your go.”

It was her turn to feel seriously put on the spot. “Um… What kind of…”

“Something unsexy, love, and something you’re unlikely to say in bed.”

Buffy’s mind was a complete blank. She found herself absolutely grasping at straws, blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “Uh… Beetlejuice!”

Spike jerked in surprise. “What the bloody hell?”

“Like, don’t say it three times or a monster’ll show up?”

“Well, that’s bloody offensive.”

/Okay, dope./ “Not a pretty one. A really ugly, unsexy one with bad breath and bad skin and bad manners.”

Spike didn’t bother to comment on the manners part. “Look, far be it from me to criticize anyone else’s safety word, Buffy, but what in the name of…”

“It was a cartoon,” she defended, feeling a little under attack. “When I was younger. I liked it.” She felt herself smile a little, batted her eyelashes. “It was stylish.”

Shaking his head in defeat, he rolled his eyes. “You were a twisted child, Slayer. Who knew?”

“Oh, shut…” She stopped herself just in time, froze briefly with a skirl of panic rushing up through her belly. “Oh c’mon!” she rerouted, panting a little. “I didn’t knock your word.”

He obviously noted her adjustment, let his fingers trail over her hand, just lightly, in appreciation; keeping it light. “Alright. Yeah. Whatever you say, pet. Long as you remember it in the moment.”

She fought to get her breathing back to standard. /Keep it light./ “And  _ you _ do.”

He scoffed loudly. “No fear, luv. I’d stop dead whatever I was doing, you say something odd as that.” 

“Whatever.” She could breathe. She could.

Smirking, he kept his fingers pressing lightly to the back of her hand for just a second longer, offering reassurance, before he turned to put the car in gear. “S’pose we should go see Mum.”

“Oh, I see how it is,” Buffy huffed, crossing her arms. /Light, easy. Everything’s gonna be okay./ “You don’t like my unsexy word, so you’re gonna play all hard to get…”

He shook his head and reached over to ratchet the seat back into place behind her. Nodded toward the side window and the curb beyond. For the first time, Buffy paid attention to extraneous sounds, heard the voices of her friends piling out of Giles’ apartment and onto the nearby sidewalk. 

“…Got to go to the grocery store and get some milk,” Xander was saying.

“Will you drop me off at the gallery, Xander?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. Sounds like kind of a late day, though, huh Ahn?”

“I have inventory. Joyce has her weekly dinner-date with Buffy and Spike, so I’m being very kind and taking up the slack.”

Willow’s wry voice broke in. “They don’t seem to realize they’re supposed to be going to dinner.”

“Ugh,” Buffy sighed. “We’ve been found out.” /Just a normal day… only with… Oh God.../ Making a sour face, she fumbled for her camisole and pulled it back on.

Spike smirked and started the car. “Gotta live up to everyone’s expectations.” Then he frowned grimly, showcasing one of his mercurial mood-changes as he pulled off to head toward downtown. “Besides; considering you never get a sodding break, you need to take every moment of pleasure you can manage, and about time they understand that.”

He was trying to change the subject. Which she appreciated, and she should go with it, for his sake if nothing else.

Consequently, Buffy bit her lip and did her best. “I don’t think they will, Spike. They’re not Slayers. They’re just the support staff, so they get to choose, and to walk away if it ever gets too much. To have sick days, to be overwhelmed. They’re never gonna understand what it’s like to have a Calling.” /They’re not me./

His fingers whitened on the wheel as he turned it in a wide arc toward Johnson. She could feel him vibrating on some vast edge, like a volcano. “What?”

“Oh, bloody hell,” he growled. “I’ll take you, love. Even if they won’t allow it. I’ll dig back into that sodding Amara treasure, fence the lot, and get you there. I still think it’s a fucking joke that you have to write it off as a bloody working holiday, but I’ll see you get it if I have to dust doing it.”

The words sent a thrill of terror through her. “Please don’t ever say that,” she whispered, fingers clenched on his thigh. The fear felt like a premonition.

His mouth tightened. “I’m just saying, love, the way they treat you, like you’re bleedin’ chattel…” And he jerked the car hard over toward Main.

She nodded, looked down at her hands. “I get that. And maybe I’m buying into it. But it’s how I tick now. If it’s not for slaying, I’d feel guilty the whole time, and…”   
“Oh, sod that! As if any bloody thing ever happens here in the buggering summer anyway!”

Buffy frowned, unwilling to admit that was probably true. 

“C’mon, pet, you’ve gone to LA to see your deadbeat bloody father for a whole sodding summer, yeah? You’ve…”

She shut down, knew he felt it. 

In the resultant silence, he sighed. “Bloody hell, pet. I’m sorry. I really am. It’s just…”

/Dammit./ “I know. And you’re right. And after an apocalypse everyone’s quiet… like even the troublemakers are exhausted and want a vacay somewhere else. It’s just…” She almost had to whisper it. “Especially after… what happened with the Hellions… I’m afraid. To relax.”

“Fuck.” It burst out of him… and to her shock, he punched the dashboard of his beloved car, breathed through his nose for a moment to calm himself… and pulled over for a moment to the shoulder. “Sodding hell, Buffy,” he insisted, and now he was facing her, eyes blazing like blue fires. “You can take a break without having to pay for it. You’ve already paid, over and bloody over again. You’re  _ allowed _ . You don’t have to feel sodding  _ guilty _ for wanting a damn bit of rest!”

She nodded down into her palms. “I know that. Intellectually I know it, but here?” She tapped the back of her head. “In my lizard brain? Not so much.”

He fumbled for her hand, pulled it down, wrapped it up in his own to hold it tight. “We need to reeducate you. You’ve bloody well been brainwashed. You’re a soddin’ child soldier, Buffy.”

Buffy jerked, startled, and stared at him.

“That psychology textbook of yours cover post-traumatic stress an’ the lot?”

/Well, shit./ “Yes.”

“Pay any attention?”

Her mind wanted to shy away from this all-too-pointed conversation. “I tried to skim a lot and ignore the rest.”

“Figures.”

She fought not to squirm away. “Can I have a break?” she asked softly.

His lips twitched. “You using your safeword?”

She felt the smile come to her lips. “You’re kind of begging me not to say it, huh.”

“I’ll stop for now.”

“I’ll say it if I need to…” she threatened.

Tugging his hand away, he put the car firmly back into gear. “It’s fine, pet. I’ll give it a rest.” 

It almost made her giggle, how much the word scared him. “Beetle…”

“I already bloody stopped!”

They pulled up in front of the gallery a few minutes later, landing in time to see Xander driving off. As Spike put the DeSoto in park and turned it off, he was frowning again. “Out of curiosity, pet, what was that business with Harris and the scotch?”

“Oh.” Buffy sighed heavily. “I think his parents are bad alcoholics. Life at home is kind of rough for him; or at least it was before he moved out. I’m pretty sure he had to play bartender, and that they at least yelled a lot. Anyway, it’s a thing.”

Spike cast his eyes skyward through the roof of the car, and reached for his door’s handle. “Oh, hell.” And there was a wealthy of frustration and even maybe a hint of regret in his voice.

“You didn’t know.”

“No wonder the little nit is such a pissant. And no sodding wonder he wanted out of the bloody basement.”

“Yeah, well.” Laying a hand on her own, Buffy sighed. “He used to spend a lot of time camping out in the backyard. Till he started coming out to our house that’s what he did for Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

A short silence, then, “Never thought I’d say I felt sorry for that little prat.”

“Yeah. Good family fun, I guess.”

Jerking open his car door, Spike came around as was his wont to escort her out. Buffy met him, as was hers, to circumvent being handed out like some sort of damsel, and joined him to lay her hand on his. “Look. He’ll live. We all have stuff.”

He grunted neutrally in answer. It was enough of a tell that she knew he felt uncomfortable, much as he might try to pretend that, as the resident, recovering Big Bad, he didn’t care all that much.

She would let him go on pretending. “Let’s go in. We need to check in with Mom. I’m sure she’s feeling bad about the whole mask thing. We all know how blunt Anya can be.” 

“Yeah,” Spike agreed, giving her fingers a squeeze. “Vengeance is a fair treat, but her tongue tends to be on the sharp side on occasion.”

They passed the windows filled with paintings and the occasional sculpture, the flyers mentioning the next few showings and, as was a local merchant’s duty, events like the arthouse theater’s upcoming showcase of some movie Buffy had never heard of in German which was “Werner Herzog’s ouvre”.

Of course, Spike held the glass door open for her, to the accompanying tinkle of the little bell, because he simply couldn’t help himself. Buffy didn’t even bother to throw him an amused glance anymore for his random spasms of old-timey chivalry. They were as much a part of him as his cutting wit and biting sarcasm.

Once inside, Anya spoke up before even Mom could. “Hello, Buffy and Spike. I’m surprised we beat you here. Unless you stopped on the side of the road for another moment of intimate bliss.”

Mom rolled her eyes as she stood, having ducked behind the counter to bring the cash box to the surface. She tended to find Anya’s bluntness refreshing… except when it came to her daughter’s sexual relationship with her favorite vampire. “We need to make this deposit tonight, if you’re willing, Anya.”

“Oh, I’m very willing, Joyce. You know how I love handling the money.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Buffy informed her mother as they approached the counter. “It was more a relationship freakout.”

“Oh?” Looking concerned, she eyed them both with a slight frown touching the edges of her lips. “Is everything okay?” Her eyes darted to Spike, narrowed a little. “I thought you’d settled everything after that business with Dracula… and there’s a sentence I never thought I’d utter in my life. I certainly haven’t seen much of either of you lately, which seemed a pretty good indication that you’ve mended fences.”

“Oh, we have, Mum,” Spike hastened to assure her. “Just standard business. Getting on with things, yeah?”

“Well… good.”

Buffy looked around the room, wondering why it was so quiet. “Where’s Dawn?” Usually Mom would have slipped away to pick her up from school by now.

“Oh, I let her go home with Janice. She promised to be back in time for dinner.”

Spike rumbled a little. “Not a big fan of that chit. She’s a troublemaker.”

“Don’t be overprotective, Spike,” Mom chided as she peered at the receipts. “Sure, Janice isn’t my first choice for peers. Obviously she’s not the best influence in the world, but every teenager needs friends, and the time to realize on their own where to make those mistakes. If I told her not to spend time with Janice she’d just work harder to do the exact opposite.” A quick flash of warm, placid smile in Buffy’s direction. “I learned that the first time around.”

“Because I was such a rebel.”

Mom leveled her with a  _ look _ . “Burned down the high school.”

“Okay, it was just the gym. And there were  _ vampires _ in it, remember?”

Spike was grinning as he looked her up and down. “Never heard that. Torched a whole bloody building to take out a nest, did you?”

“Okay, but look. They had me surrounded, and Lothos was  _ such _ a bastard…”

He tugged her close by her waist, looking exceedingly proud. “That’s my girl.”

Rolling her eyes, because look who was being a bad influence, Buffy went for a decided subject change. “Anya, how’s the money situation?”

“Oh, it’s going very nicely, Buffy, thank you for inquiring!” As always, when asked about anything cash- or business-related, the ex-demon girl turned completely bubbly. She paused mid-count to smile sunnily, both hands holding wads of cash. “The gallery does a modest but steady business, now Joyce and I have conspired to rearrange certain aspects of the marketing. I think we make a formidable team.”

“I’ll say,” Mom agreed, and set down the receipts to circle the counter. “Anya’s a whiz at managing a business. I did alright before, but that part was never my strong suit, even when I took the class. I’m definitely better at the art and art history parts. I guess I’ve always needed a business manager in here so I could focus on acquisitions and coordinating with artists. Connecting with the buyers. You know, the fun stuff, while someone else does the part I  _ don’t _ enjoy…”

“I’m pleased to be of assistance! Especially if it means I get to handle the money, and balance the budget. Lining up all those little numbers is such a joy...”

“See? She’s perfect.” Mom smiled fondly over at her friend. “And, of course, she’s here if I accidentally order anything that’s demon-possessed,” she put in a little sadly.

“C’mon, Mom,” Buffy interrupted. She had, after all, been ready for this. “That’s not your fault. It’s not like you’re trained to recognize stuff like that.”

“Buffy’s right, Joyce,” Spike chimed in immediately. “No reason you’d know. Won’t have you blamin’ yourself.”

“It’s true. Ignorance is an excellent defense; at least in modern courts.”

Mom smiled at their fierce tones, and Anya’s blasé one. “You’re all very sweet. I suppose I’ll let myself off the hook this time.” Turning to her business partner, she lightly touched the countertop. “You’re sure you’re fine with me leaving?”

“I’m glad of the opportunity, Joyce, and the trust. Please, leave me alone with the money and go away.”

Her lips twitched. “You’re always so straightforward. And you’ll be alright?”

“The bank is only a few yards away. The night-drop is on this side of the block. My apartment is a block beyond. I fail to see how I can get into any trouble, even in Sunnydale, in such a situation.”

Buffy frowned. “You know that’s just asking for trouble, to say it like that.”

“I have friends in low places. If anyone bothers me, I’ll have Kerakh beat them to death.”

Spike looked surprised and impressed. “Kerakh, is it?”

“Yes, he wishes me to have sex with him, so he’s been hovering outside the gallery and my apartment, and commonly following me around hoping for sexual favors. I assume his looming presence will discourage any interlopers.”

Buffy blinked and decided not to ask exactly what kind of demon Kerakh was. “Uh, doesn’t this guy know you already have a… A sexual partner?” /Or whatever./

Anya favored her with an assessing look. “Not everyone is in an exclusive relationship, Buffy. Xander knows that I occasionally look elsewhere for satisfaction. He’s free to do so as well, though I’m not sure that he does…”

/Because he’s in love with you./ Buffy wondered if Anya realized that. But to be fair, Xander had really hurt her last year when he’d broken her trust with his anti-demon bigotry. She knew Anya had also at least guessed some of what had gone on between herself and Xander when he’d had himself a little demon-time. 

Amazingly, Anya had taken that knowledge in stride, perhaps analyzing their subsequent relationship for any evidence of Xander’s straying toward similar trends. She had made a few comments here and there about how all men were, at base, confirmed monsters, very few of them worthy even of her sexual favors, but she had also mentioned, very frankly, that she did in fact require someone with whom to enjoy said adventures, and she had had sex with worse people. A reformed character walking a redemptive path and who gave good orgasms was better, she had opined, than a string of worse and unsatisfying losers.

She had also kind of implied that this way, she could keep an eye on him. Which was really an unnerving idea, since Buffy kind of thought that Anya wouldn’t mind doing a little more vengeance here and there if she thought she could get away with it, powers or no powers.

Buffy had tried more than once during these muttered, one-sided conversations to convince the ex-demon that she actually thought that Xander was one of the good-guys; but as far as she could tell, the whole thing had just served to confirm for Anya that there really was no such thing. She doubted that Xander would ever make inroads back into his lover’s heart. It looked like at best all they’d ever manage again would be friends with benefits.

And it was not Buffy’s circus, not her monkeys. Tough to watch one of her best friends suffer from unrequited love, but… /Not my problem, if I don’t want him to make my love life his business./ 

“For instance,” Anya went on blithely, counting tens from one hand to another, “I’m certain that at some point he’ll explore sex with a man, or perhaps a male demon. Though each time I suggest it to him he covers his ears and runs the other direction as if I’d thrown Tarkhelian dust at him…”

Spike let out an abrupt guffaw, though he choked it off into a rumble at Buffy’s sharp glare. “Right, well… best not to push the lad, Vengeance, or you’re like to send him off the deep end.”

“I’m not sure why he’s being so stubborn about it. Considering his leanings, I think he’d find it a very enjoyable experience. I told him I wasn’t at all opposed if he wanted to explore things with Jonathan, as long as it didn’t cut into  _ our _ time together…”

“And on that note,” Mom broke in, “I think I’ve learned quite a bit more about Xander Harris than I ever wanted to know. Thank you for making the deposit, Anya.”

“Oh, of course. Have a lovely dinner, Joyce.”

On the way out, Spike paused to eye a piece near the entrance. “This a one new, Mum?”

“Oh. No, actually it’s an older one I rotated out from the back to see if I could get it some exposure before I send it on to another gallery to see if it’ll do better elsewhere.” She frowned slightly. “I don’t know why it never sold. I like it a lot.”

Spike eyed it with interest; long enough that Buffy halted to study it as well. She wasn’t sure what he found so riveting. “What?” As far as she could tell it was just sun shining through some pillars somewhere.

“It’s the Grand Colonnade in Versailles,” he murmured. “Never seen it in the daylight. Looks a whole lot different in the sun than in lamplight.” His voice sounded decidedly breathy, almost awed. “And the perspective. Photographer must’ve lain down to take the photo, yeah? To get such an odd angle. And what sort of film must he have used, to get such an effect? Looks almost like a bloody painting.”

Mom was watching Spike with a strange, wistful look on her face. “I’m not sure what she used; some kind of developing trick to soften it up. You like it?”

“It’s bleeding gorgeous,” he breathed. Buffy had never heard him talk like that. Like he’d been stricken dumb. His hand rose, lightly brushed the edges of the piece with just his fingertips. “That was one of the few places I’d been in the world where I didn’t…” He cut off abruptly, and his hand dropped away. “All beauty, there. Meant to keep it that way. There’d been enough blood in that sodding place.”

/Huh?/

In the resultant silence, Mom reached up, tugged the photo off the wall. And pressed it into Spike’s hands. “It’s yours.”

Spike jerked away as if he’d been burned. “I can’t take this, Joyce!”

“You can. I’ll pay the artist. My gift to you.”

“Joyce, I…”

“You’ve made my daughter happier than I’ve ever seen her, these last few months. This makes you happy. I want you to have it.”

Buffy didn’t think she’d ever seen her guy look so panicked. He was backpedaling away, looking almost frantic. “I couldn’t…”

“Alright, when’s your birthday?”

He gaped at her, now thoroughly flummoxed. “My what?”

“Well, Christmas is already over,” Mom answered, reasonably enough.

“Joyce…” he protested weakly, “I haven’t celebrated a birthday in a hundred and…”

“Well then, it’s about time we do, isn’t it?”

He put his hands behind his back and clasped them like a kid who’d been caught rummaging in the cookie jar. “I don’t even remember when it is,” he told her tersely, “so…”

“Nonsense. You’re just trying to be polite. If you won’t tell me when it was, you’re just going to have to take it now. And if you won’t, I’ll give it to Buffy and she’ll hang it on your wall when you’re not looking, right baby?”

Buffy grinned, ready to be in on this conspiracy. “You bet.” /And you know now I’m gonna find out about the birthday, and why you’re being so weird./

Spike shot her a poisonous glare, then jerked back to Mom, his body broadcasting alarm. His eyes flickered to the photo and back again to her face, naked desire warring with a strange terror there. “I…”

Buffy frowned, confused at the way that bizarre dread wended through the link between them. “Why don’t you wanna take a gift from Mom, Spike?”

His voice shook. “Because… Oh, bloody hell.” He shook his head and reached out his hands, a look now of sheer, stubborn irritation overriding the panic in his features. By the time he’d touched Mom’s fingers over the paper frame of the print, his expression had slipped over into rueful. “Thank you, Joyce. I’m touched.”

“I’m glad,” Mom answered softly. “Because you’re one of us now, Spike. So beware. We do birthdays; and gifts, when people mean a lot to us.”

He actually flinched as he took the photo. And then touched the edges of the picture again, a shy pleasure taking over his features. “It’s lovely.”

“Good,” Mom answered, then with a quick, decisive nod, “See you at home.” And she headed out the door for the Jeep.

Spike remained frozen, staring down at the print. 

“What?” Buffy asked again, softly, and waited.

The silence hung between them for a long moment, filled only with the rustling of Anya’s money-counting in the distance, across the room, and the faint sounds of traffic outside on Main. Finally, “Me mum gave me a gift. Before she…”

“Oh.”

“Nothing much,” he whispered. “Just a bit of a thing, to show she cared. No particular reason, but…” And when he lifted his eyes, naked fear shone in them.

Buffy touched his hand. “It doesn’t mean anything, William,” she told him softly, using the pet name she seldom pulled out except when he was particularly emotional, or she was. “Nothing’s going to happen to her, just because she gave you a present.”

He shivered involuntarily. “I reckon you’re right. It just threw me for a loop is all.”

“C’mon,” she told him, and tugged him toward the door. “Let’s go to dinner.”

“Yeah.”

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
onward to some smooshy, snuggly family stuff with Buffy-Spike-Joyce, because god knows I couldn't get enough of it when I was writing it, and I cannot WAIT to share it.   
  
I swear, writing the dynamic with that lot (and often, with Dawn included, depending on the situation) has been the best thing in the world. I literally _**wallow**_ in it.  
  
  



	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, short-ish chapter; but as promised, I give you all some cute, domestic Spoyce stuff and general "Spike is part of the family" joy.
> 
> I swear to god, this stuff gives me life. Hopefully it will do the same to y'all in quarantine.  
> Also... Spuffy are in TROOOOOUBLE...  
> HEE.

Spike was spending a heck of a long time sitting in the car, looking overwhelmed and staring down at picture in his hands. He had this weird mix of pleasure and confusion on his face, and drifting through their bond. Buffy gave him a minute before speaking up. “When  _ is _ your birthday, Spike?”

Jerked away from his study of the French palace, her vampire blinked up at her, a little nonplussed, then narrowed his eyes with suspicious interest as if wondering at her angle. He didn’t, though, try to prevaricate with her the way he had with her mother. “Which one, pet?” he asked instead.

Of all rejoinders or put-offs, _that_ was one Buffy had not expected in the slightest. “Okay, huh?”

With a faint twist to his lips, Spike turned to set the picture in the backseat with a reverence that said he found it precious. “Been born twice in a way, innit?” he reminded her, avoiding her eyes.

Buffy frowned at that, momentarily confused in her own turn, before understanding dawned. “Oh. You, uh, consider that a rebirth?”

“Yeah.” He eyed her blandly, eyes meeting hers with a kind of challenge in them. “A renaissance. Wouldn’t you?”

It had honestly never occurred to her, now that she knew what she knew. But then, he had died, and come back, and… “Yeah, I guess… Yeah. Okay, well, then…”

When she didn’t back down, he sighed and dropped his hands to the steering wheel. “My birthday as William was June the twenty-sixth. My demonic birthday was November the twenty-third, on an uncommonly warm winter day.” And he started up the engine.

They made the entire drive to Revello in silence. For her part, Buffy found herself wondering idly if vampires counted the day they’d been drained and bitten or the day they’d risen to their new unlife as their ‘birthday’, but didn’t bother to ask. It didn’t particularly matter either way. A couple days’ leeway wouldn’t change much since, unfortunately, both birthdays were kind of far away for her purposes. One had just recently passed. The other was super close to Christmas. 

/Well, at least it gives me time to hunt around, find a good replacement./ “Good to know,” she informed him softly as he pulled into the driveway. 

His head jerked over so he could eye her with a very real suspicion. “Why, Buffy?”

Stepping out of the car, she wandered over to the verge of the porch, leaned against a carport post. When he joined her there, moving like an intent predator, she shot for coquettish. Looked up at him under hooded eyes, hands in pockets and half in the shade with the heat of the newly-arrived Jeep at her back. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

His eyes flashed, bright blue in the low glow of the distant streetlamp and fierce with the challenge of it. He stalked one vast stride nearer to close the distance, the shrunken space between them crackling. “Oh, I’ll pry it from you, never you fear, pet,” he informed her in lowered tones

“You’ll try.”

“Oh. I’ll make you talk, Buffy. Have you beggin’ to tell me before the end.”

Buffy shivered at the heat in his voice, already aching with anticipation. “That’s a really ineffective threat, just so you know,” she managed, lightly. “And also, not gonna work.” Hopefully that sounded as certain as it felt.

Faster than a striking snake he scooped her around the waist, dragged her up against him. “Care to make a small wager?” he breathed, hard against her and lips trailing along her neck. 

Well, now she wasn’t going to give in no matter what he did. “You know I could just tell you to stop, right?” she reminded him, hands pressed against his chest not in token refusal but in welcome, body molding to him of its own free will as she fought not to shudder full-bodied, to keep her brain from short-circuiting at the feel of his hands cupping her ass, tugging her hard and high against him. Her traitorous legs were already trembling with the need to hitch up and wrap around his waist.

“That’s just cheating,” he informed her, grating and harsh against her throat.

He had a point. And she’d only been joking anyway. Like she ever would go there. “Alright. No commands.” It came out in a strained whisper, and damn him.

“Excellent.” He nipped her behind the ear, and wholly against her will, she bucked a little against his hips. “What’s the wager, luv?”

Breathing through her nose; that was the thing. It steadied the brain cells. Sort of. “I, um… What were we talking about again?”

Grinning against her neck, he scraped his human teeth down along her wildly-thrumming carotid, teasing other delights. “I’m going to win, Slayer.”

/Grr. Sometimes I still hate you./ “Not if I can’t even remember what we’re talking about. Interrogation’s wildly ineffective when… nnnnn… When you can’t remember anything about the… Oh God. The conversation…” He was rocking her against his hard length now, just so, and her clit was crying out for those jeans to be gone, and she was only wearing a skirt, how long would it really take for them to just…

“This is gonna take a lot longer than we have right now, pet. And I prefer a horizontal surface; one a lot further away from your mum’s house. So hold that thought, yeah?” And to Buffy’s confusion and distinct displeasure, Spike set her away from him and firmly detached her arms from his neck.

The reason for this move became apparent when Mom’s voice sounded over the railing of the porch behind him, a low, clarion call in the warming summer evening. “Hey, you two. Get in here and help me. Buffy, you’re on salad duty. Spike, you’re cutting the steak; and no drinking the blood off the plate till after you’re done, young man.”

Spike eyed Buffy pointedly as he pulled away and tugged her splayed body off the post with both hands. “C’mon, pet. Let’s get in.” 

/Okay, now that I’m totally indecent for motherly company, you jerk./

As they entered the kitchen, Buffy was greeted with a bowl half-full of leafy things. She  _ oofed _ as the large, Pyrex item was shoved into her arms, to slam solidly against her solar plexus. “Happy to see you too, Mom. Isn’t the salad Dawn’s job?” The complaint, like the impact, would get her reset back to an even keel. One that did not involve obsessing over her boyfriend’s many charms.

“She called and begged to eat at Janice’s house.” Mom had already turned away, back for the stove. “Looks like it’s just gonna be us. Something about enchiladas and how steak is boring…”

Spike stopped dead behind Buffy.  _ “Boring?” _ he burst out, incredulous. “Bloody hell, that’s good red meat, that is; and anyhow, doesn’t she know this is  _ family _ dinner night? I could strangle her!" he blustered. "Do you want me to go over there, Joyce? I can drag her back by her hair! I’ve no problem being the bad guy…”

“I appreciate the offer, Spike, but I’ve already given her my permission.” The fond amusement in Mom’s voice turned to quiet solemnity. “And besides, I thought maybe this would give us all time to have more adult conversation.”

“Oh.” Spike subsided abruptly, sounding stymied. “What did we do now?” 

He didn’t have to sound so harried. Buffy could do that for the both of them. Turning away from where she’d set the salad bowl on the island, she sighed. “Seriously. Did we screw up somehow?”

“Oh, no. I just thought we could check in, see how you’re doing lately.”

Eee. That sounded mildly dire.

They assembled the dinner things in companionable silence and with the ease of long practice, Spike thoroughly abusing the steaks with a meat-tenderizing hammer and sending them off to Mom to be sautéed with onions and spices and some sort of marinade she’d picked up and then slowly simmered into, in Spike’s case, rare, in Buffy’s medium-rare, and in hers, medium states. 

Spike, meanwhile, got to take the plate back. No one even blinked anymore when he poured off the blood into a mug and stood sipping it while he watched and handed things to people. He got only one comment during proceedings. “Did you wash your hands, Spike?”

“Oh. No. Forgot. Sorry, Joyce, was distracted.”

Buffy rolled her eyes from where she was grating cheese into the salad he wouldn’t eat. “Remind me not to touch anything you’ve touched.”

He favored her with a tolerant glare and tossed back the last sip of his gleanings. “As if you haven’t had worse on you.” Turning to the sink with his mug, he set to washing hands and container, the muscles in his shoulders flexing under his dark tee. “Last night you had offal hanging out of your hair for twenty minutes. You’d never have even known it was there if I hadn’t told you.”

Stung, Buffy shot back, “Okay, but to be fair, I didn’t exactly expect that whatever-it-was to literally explode when I beheaded it.”

Turning back to face her, he did the thing with his tongue and ran his eyes up and down her body. “Not complainin’, mind. You looked dead sexy, all covered in gore…”

/Oh, for God’s sake./ “Keep it PG for the parental units, Spike, remember?” she censored, and threw a cherry tomato at him. It struck him square between the eyes and bounced off, only to be caught and popped between his lips. Which was surprising, because he didn’t tend to eat any vegetation if he could help it, predator that he was. Well, except for those onion-blossom things. Which were kind of gross. Unlike cherry tomatoes when…

Eyes on hers, he waggled his brows. Tickled the small, red rondel with the tip of his tongue. And grinned.

Blushing, Buffy swung away to toss the salad.

“Careful, luv. That lettuce and the lot is flying right out of the bowl.”

Mom turned calmly away from the stove to reach into the nearby overhead cupboard for some seasoning or another… and whacked Spike’s hand with the spatula that she held. Hard.

“Bloody ow!” he howled, cradling the offended paw. “What did you do that for, Joyce?”

Turning back to the cast iron, Mom flipped her steaks. “I’m sure you were misbehaving somehow,” she answered primly, and scattered some steakhouse thing over the whole pan. 

“Damn,” he hissed, rubbing the faint imprints of the spatula holes, swiping at the grease. “How do you know it wasn’t Buffy was misbehaving?”

Smiling slightly, Mom shook her head. “I was playing the odds.”

Buffy smiled sunnily, scorecard intact. “And the Slayer gets the benefit of the doubt.”

Spike growled. “One of these days you’re gonna use that against me to get away with something truly diabolical, right under Mum’s nose, and I’ll take all the bloody blame…”

“Definitely. I’m still planning my grand, evil plot, though, while you keep digging yourself into deeper holes so no one will ever believe it was me being the bad one when it happens.”

“Oh, bloody hell. Get into a little trouble for just a few decades...” 

Buffy paused in her salad-making to hack falsely into her hand. “Cough-century-cough…”

“…And all the sodding sudden you get no credit with anyone…”

Swinging away from her finished project, Buffy sallied forth from the island to approach him, pressed herself against his long, lean form so that he had to either keep his palms on the counter or place them conveniently on her waist. Or butt, if he wanted to get in trouble with Mom. “You get all the credit in the world with me,” she told him softly, and looked directly into his eyes as she said it.

“Oh, hell, Buffy,” he whispered, and bent to kiss her.

Buffy wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to anyone or anything else but him. That already tended to happen when she was kissing Spike, even before the whole ‘sharing sensations’ thing. Now it was even more of a thing. Which meant that Mom’s voice made her jump about five feet when it broke through the moment. “Not to interrupt, but… one rare steak. Also, young lady, you do know that I’m onto you now, and I’ll be vigilant. Spike’s going to get the benefit of the doubt from here on out.”

“Damn,” Buffy murmured against cool lips.

Strong fingers tightened briefly on her waist, her shoulder blade, then… “Teach you to talk out of turn, pet.” And he put her away from him to smile at Mom. “Cheers, Joyce. It looks lovely. Smells a treat as well.”

“Thank you, Spike. Yours’ll be done in a minute, Buffy. Why don’t you two get the table set. It’ll keep your wandering hands out of mischief.” It was said with fond amusement rather than anything forbidding. Still, they disengaged and went about the indicated business. Best never to push things. 

Mom was their greatest ally. And she had one rule. Romantic, yes, but no over-the-top sexy vibes all up in her house. It was a decree which she was probably aware they had broken while she had been elsewhere, but everyone involved was doing their best to play by nice, civilized guidelines like ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’, and ‘what I don’t know doesn’t hurt me’. 

Table set to the tune of a lot of knowing, flirty looks to keep temperatures to a simmer, and Mom was exiting with the other two steaks while Buffy doled out the salad for herself and the other leaf-eating member of the dining public. “Okay, who wants what to drink?” she asked as she headed back into the kitchen.

Spike looked up from where he was holding a chair for Mom. “Dunno.” He glanced down at their hostess. “You got any more of that nice Malbec you opened last week, Mum? That’d go down a fair treat with this steak.”

“You know, it really would. Buffy,” Mom called, “can you bring out the wine bottle from the deal on the counter and the wine key? And whatever for yourself. Unless you want to join us.”

Buffy blinked. She was underage, and wouldn’t have expected her mother to treat her as one of the adults in that way. Also, she’d never had wine; or at least, that she’d liked. She’d had some at a wedding once, which was meh. Also some crappy thing from a box, once, at a college party, which she’d thought was gross. Granted, so was beer, unless it was cave-beer or you’d had enough to stop caring, but you had to choke it down for a while to get to that point, which, ugh. 

Basically when it came to most alcohol she just really didn’t get the attraction. “Uh… I mean, I’m not sure. It’s not, you know, something I’ve ever…”

“Mean to tell me you never tried it at one of those college shindigs, Slayer?”

/Okay, bastard. Trying to out me to Mom./ “I just don’t get how it’s supposed to taste good,” she hedged.

“It tastes good when it’s not rubbish,” Spike opined. “Promise you you’ll like it with the steak.” Seen over Mom’s hair as he took his seat, he tilted his head in her direction. “Probably she should only have a bit, though, if she’s not used to it, else I’ll have to carry her upstairs and pour her into bed.”

“Trust me, I have no interest in seeing my daughter plastered. I’m alright with her doing a little taste-testing, though.”

Okay, wow with the conspiracy to give her booze. “I’m so gonna get myself a backup drink in case I hate it,” she warned them, and detoured to pick up three of the wine-glasses Mom favored. Her mother was probably looking forward to having someone to drink the stuff with. Not that she didn’t have a little wine with Anya here and there when they had their weekly business meetings, but… Well. 

Mom’s friendship with her boyfriend could be freaksome sometimes, for sure, between the almost nightly  _ Passions  _ dates and stuff like this. They were going to wear out the VCR  _ and _ run up a wine bill.

Arriving back at the table with the wine-bottle dangling between two fingers, the mini- corkscrew-thing hanging from her pinkie, and three wine-glasses and a mug of orange juice pressed to her chest, Buffy stood before her mother and her vampire. “Help.”

Smirking, Spike relieved her of the bottle, while Mom extricated the glasses and key from her grip so she didn’t drop her juice. Then, moving away with her mug and her glass, Buffy set them both carefully down and sighed in relief. “I’ve decided I’m not made for delicate tasks.”

Spike lowered his head a little to hide his expression and made a sound Buffy recognized as his low, strangled, speedy mischief-chuckle, while a thrill of hilarity shot through their link.

Buffy kicked him hard in the ankle.

Luckily, Mom appeared to miss this byplay while she moved to open the wine. “This is so much easier the second time around,” she muttered as she dragged the cork out, then, “Spike?”

“Ta, Joyce,” he answered, tilting his glass in her direction.

Buffy found herself vaguely startled at the way Mom poured it; all weirdly sideways into the bowl so that it sort of drizzled in instead of splashing down into the bottom. Wasn’t in danger of falling out over the rim if…

But apparently not, since they stopped with the exchange long before the wine reached the lip of the glass. “Appreciate it, Mum. Well, that smells nice, innit? Bit of blackberry or summat in that one; almost like a merlot.”

“It’s a little heavy, but I like it,” Mom agreed as she poured for herself in that same tilty way. 

“Argentine, then, not local? Doesn’t smell dry.”

“Yeah. I got it at Trader Joe’s. They actually have a pretty good wine selection.”

“Hmm.” And to Buffy’s surprise, Spike literally buried his nose in his glass, started sniffing like he was going to drink the stuff with his nostrils. “Mmm… That’s going to be lovely with that Montreal seasoning… Oh. Here, love.” Reaching out, he caught up the bottle as Mom set it down, held it out in Buffy’s direction. “Have a wee nip. If you like it there’s always more.”

“Oh, right.” Blinking, Buffy snapped up her glass and held it out, tilting it belatedly the way she’d seen them do it.

Smiling slightly, Spike righted the glass a hair for her, his fingers glancing a little over hers in a slight caress as he poured.

She shivered at the odd intensity to his gaze. It was a second before she could tear her eyes away, return them to the glass. When she saw how much wine was in the bowl, she blinked again. “That’s kind of a lot, huh?”

“Just a few sips.”

“Oh.” She supposed it was a lot less than he had.

“Don’t need to finish it if you don’t like it. I’ll take yours over, no worries.” He nodded at the glass. “Smell it, then.”

She complied, frowning. Mostly she smelled sour fruit, but maybe… something smoky? And berry-ish? And…

Well, maybe there were a lot of smells, but her brain couldn’t quite get a handle on all of it. It was kind of a mish-mash of impressions.

“Now, take a bite, love… and then sip the wine. You’ll be doin’ yourself a favor.”

Dubious, Buffy did as instructed, cutting a small slice of her still-juicy top round and sliding it into her mouth. She chewed a little to get the flavor set—Mom, as always, had done a great job and it was all buttery and seasoned and yummy—then reached out to lift the glass, took a sip to wash it down. And… oh. Now she got why she was supposed to smell the wine before she tasted it. 

The smoky thing jumped out first, wrapping around the buttery flavor of the meat and doing this complicated dance at the back of her tongue and up to the roof of her mouth, and then floating back into her nose from somewhere in the back of her throat. And then the peppery thing from the steak was doing something that almost smell-tasted like the tobacco smell from Spike when he’d just lit up, but from a distance… and maybe a little bit like leather, too? And way in the back of her throat she caught the faintest hint of something that almost tasted like plums, but it was gone before she could catch it, and she had forgotten how to swallow what was in her mouth. 

She almost choked, she was so confused.

“Hell of a thing, innit?” Spike murmured, watching her with hot, amused eyes.

Buffy swallowed hard and unwillingly and shook her head, dazzled. “Wow,” she whispered. “That was… different.”

“Welcome to wine, my love.”

“Holy crap.”

Spike turned his eyes away from Buffy, though he dropped his hand to cover hers on the table. “I think we have a winner, Joyce,” he murmured, and lifted his glass. 

“Well, like mother like daughter. But don’t go overboard, Buffy.”

“I’m sure it’ll take her a while to appreciate it without the steak as company. We’re probably safe for a while.”

“You’re probably right.”

Shaking her head, Buffy tried another sip with another bite, sure it couldn’t be as amazing the second time around. Except it was… and she tasted more things that time. And the third time. And then she ran out of wine, and suddenly the prospect of eating the rest of her steak without the wine sounded kind of dull.

Spike turned an eye to Mom, lifted his brow in question. 

Mom pursed her lips, then gave a tiny shrug and nodded. He added a few more sips to Buffy’s glass. 

Buffy was still absorbed in the single-minded task of making it last when Mom leaned back in her seat, cut a slice out of her steak, and firmed up her voice. “So. Now that we’re all friendly and relaxed, maybe I’ll get a straight answer out of you.” 

Buffy’s head jerked up. Beside her, she felt Spike tense. “Um, okay?” Clearly they were about to be interrogated. “About what?” /Note to self to not drink wine ever again, if it’s going to be used as some kind of stealth truth-drug./ Who knew Mom was so ruthless?

Leaning forward, Mom pointed her knife directly at Buffy’s face. “What were you two really fighting about? What happened with that Dracula jerk?”

/Oh wow. Oh my Godohmygod…/ Shooting Spike a panicked look, Buffy dropped a hand to his thigh and squeezed, hard. And felt her head spin. Because maybe she was a little bit drunk, and she was just now realizing it, and, /Please help?/

“It wasn’t anything you might be thinkin’, Mum,” Spike broke in, very softly. “It was more… a vamp-Slayer thing.”

Mom’s expression went through about five swift alterations before it hardened. “Well, color me relieved, at least, that I didn’t contribute to something… Well.”

/God. She thought maybe I… That…/ Though, considering that all she’d heard was that Dracula had wafted up to her daughter’s room in the middle of the night, and that Spike was furious the next several days, Buffy supposed it was a natural conclusion. But still; thinking your daughter was a tramp, much? 

To be fair, the blood thing was similarly tramp-ish, from a vampire’s perspective, though, so… “Mom, Dracula wanted me to let him… bite me.”

Whatever Mom had been expecting, that wasn’t it. Which was kind of funny, considering she’d been palling around with a vampire for months, knew her daughter was dating one, yadda. “Bite you?”

/God, this is gonna be so bad./ “Um, well… The thing is…”

“The thing is, Joyce,” Spike interrupted, “he came prancing into town and got into the middle of our business, and got into Buffy’s head. Tried to make her feel bad for letting our relationship stay one-sided when it came to that sort of thing. The problem being…”

Buffy covered his hand with hers, because no way should he have to go there. He shouldn’t have to take this on, for her, in front of her mother. “The problem is, the way things were, there was always going to be some other jerk vampire who thought he could come swinging into town and try to ‘take me away’ from Spike, because the way vamps work is kind of primitive. They smell bites, and see ‘em, and to them, it’s this whole… system. It’s politics. It’s a hassle; for Spike and for me. He let me claim him last year, as a sort of a… A vassal. Though since then…” Her entire body tingled with memories of since-thens. 

Spike’s hidden hand slid a little further up her thigh, and warmth flowed between them, certain and sure. None of it helped with the explainy-ness, and she briefly lost her train of thought.

“Since then,” Spike prompted softly.

“…It’s been more… equal,” Buffy managed, clearing her throat. “But, uh… if I didn’t let him claim  _ me, _ then the other vampires would keep treating him like crap, and I’d have to put up with every vamp in town sniffing at me like some kind of unmarked fire hydrant. Like that jerk Dracula, trying to put the moves on me, thinking there was a reason I didn’t let Spike do it yet. And really, the only reason I didn’t yet was because I had leftover issues from the way Angel did it…” Mom jerked sharply at that, looking stunned. “...Because he did it without my consent,” Buffy elaborated, “which Spike would never do. So…” She turned her gaze to her mate’s. Felt his eyes lock on hers. And the link between them sizzled. “We closed the claim. Last night.”

“Closed the…”

Spike slid his visible fingers up along the back of Buffy’s hand. She turned hers over automatically, locked her fingers with his. “Bit like a marriage, Joyce,” he breathed. “By blood. Nothing can break it. Was one-sided all this time. She had the deed to me. Now she’s given herself over in turn.” He was speaking to Mom, but his eyes were smoldering on Buffy’s now; the threat of combustion always between them, and the promise of eternal devotion. “Would’ve asked your permission first, but when the girl comes to you and proposes, sometimes you lose your head entire; fall to your knees and just say yes.”

The silence in the room was profound. Then, “Oh.” 

Buffy knew that tone, and wrenched her eyes away, because, oh shit. /Oh, damn./ “Sorry, Mom. I didn’t even think… It was just… It was between us. It happened and… It’s a Slayer-vamp thing, like Spike said. Spur of the moment. I mean… I’d been thinking about it, but…”

“For how long, pray tell?”

And there was the frigid voice. /Shit, shit, shit./ “Since Dracula? Well, I mean, before, but he kind of brought it to a head, and…”

Mom nodded and rose to her feet. “So, essentially, you eloped without telling me.”

Spike had just now cottoned on to the full nature of Mom’s hurt. His eyes jerked away, toward the head of the table. “Oh, bloody hell. Joyce, I…”

Mom held up a hand, betrayal etched all across her face. “When exactly  _ were _ you going to tell me?”

It probably wouldn’t go over well that it hadn’t occurred to either of them, really, to bring it up at all. “Well, I mean, it’s not like we can do this, you know, legally, or…”

Nodding, Mom turned her back to head into the kitchen with her plate.

“Bloody fuck,” Spike breathed.

Buffy was up already, pulling away. “Let me.”

“Should I…”

Shaking her head hard, she tugged her hand loose from his clinging grip. He was trembling slightly and just as worried as she was that the damage would be irreparable. “No. Right now I think… Just me. I’ll let you know if you should…”

“Right.” His voice was tight. Pained.

Buffy slipped away to follow her mother into the kitchen. Stopped at the doorway to pull in a hard, deep breath, hands clutched together across her middle. “I… we… didn’t do it to hurt you. We weren’t even thinking. It was… all instinct. I can’t even tell you how much of how we work is like this big ball of animal instinct. And it’s not like there were… ceremonies or anything. You wouldn’t’ve wanted to be there, I promise you. It was kind of… x-rated…”

A glass slammed down, a little too hard, on the counter. Buffy jumped, felt Spike do the same behind her. /Oh, damn./ “You said you wanted us to fix it.”

A short, harsh silence, then, “I didn’t say ‘get married’ to fix it, Buffy.  _ You’re nineteen!” _

/Oh jeez./ Buffy bit her lip. “Do you love Spike?”

There was a pause, and a clatter as Mom finally set her plate down. “Dammit, Buffy, you  _ know _ I do. And I love how he is for you. And I know there are things I’ll never understand about how you two work, but I’ve been  _ here _ for you. I’ve been in your corner…”

“You have,” Buffy interrupted softly, and moved a little further into the kitchen. “And you have no idea how grateful we are.” She got that her mother had to feel at sea sometimes with some of Slayer stuff, and definitely with the… Well. The other species stuff. Heck; sometimes Buffy herself did, when she stopped to think like a human, when she didn’t just feel her way. /It  _ only _ makes sense when I feel my way, and Mom can’t do that. She doesn’t have those instincts./ 

Buffy was also, in a way, a member of another species, or at least a subset of humanity, or a mixture or something. And that was where she always met Spike as an equal; on that instinctive, non-human level. The mixy one, where some human leaked through, but the inner monsters were met and challenged, and matched. Satisfied.

Her mother could never fully comprehend that. Mom only had the human rubric, and Buffy got that by that procedure, Mom felt robbed of something she had thought her eldest daughter would never have, before now. Definitely since Buffy had started dating someone without a legal identity. Also, to her, it would seem super quick and early, and maybe a betrayal of her leniency when it came to the relationship; like they had impulsively taken advantage of her relaxed response to her daughter dating yet another vampire to hitch them together for life. Her nightmare, probably. /She’s probably, like, torn in half, because we did it when she’s scared to death of that, and we didn’t even give her the chance to get used to the idea and let her celebrate it with us./

Well, Buffy couldn’t do anything about the first part, but as to the second… “I get that you have concerns. I won’t be able to change that for you. But if you want to throw a party,” she went on softly, “and do that whole thing, I’m sure we’ll be down.” Even if Spike wasn’t, he’d still do it. For his Summers women, he’d do just about anything. “Though, you know, hopefully at sunset, so Spike doesn’t turn to a little pile of dust…”

Mom made a scoffing noise. “The day we get that boy into a tux is the day I buy stock in invisible nickels.”

Behind Buffy, in the dining room, Spike snorted sarcastically.

“Well, you might have to resign yourself to a lot of pictures with leather in them.” Fond reminiscence stole over her, curving her lips upward. “But to be fair, when we planned this before, we had a whole blood-fondue thing in the notebook, so count your blessings.”

A stunned note entered Mom’s voice. “When you… Buffy, when did you…”

/Oops./ “Uh, long story? There was a spell involved. Though…” Leaning back, Buffy eyed Spike through the opening. “I don’t suppose you kept any of that? It might soothe the ruffled feathers now.”

“What kind of tosser do you take me for, pet?”

Buffy narrowed her eyes at him over her crossed arms. 

“Fine. It’s in with my journals at the crypt.”

Satisfied, she leaned back in to nod at Mom. “Some of the ideas were a little… out there. Garish. But some of ‘em might work. If that’s what you wanna do.” She dropped her arms, shrugged. “The thing is, we’re… linked, Mom.” Stepping forward, she touched her mother’s hand where her mother stood frozen and unwilling near the sink. “We already were, but now it’s unbreakable. We’re in this for the long haul. So, yeah. Whatever you want, but this is it.”

Another long pause, then… “Spike, come in here.” The tone brooked no disobedience.

A chair scraped, and then he was there, looking badly in need of a cigarette. “Yeah, Joyce?” His tones were trying for diffident, but mostly they landed on anxious.

“What are all your names?”

Spike jerked like he’d been hit with a taser. “Beg pardon, Mum?”

“All. Your. Names.”

He froze, so comically that Buffy almost felt bad for him, except… Okay, she was kind of curious herself. By dint of some serious poking and prodding over the last almost-year, she had eventually dug his old surname out of him, but the rest was like trying to find buried treasure sealed beneath the foundation of a rebuilt house, constructed over the top of a basement filled with concrete. William was part of the structural integrity of Spike, but the rest? 

She wasn’t sure when she had seen her guy look this floored.

“William,” Mom intoned, pulling out the big guns, and pinned him in place with Mom Glare Number Seventeen (use only in case of dire emergency), “if you’re going to be my son-in-law, I’m going to know all your names.”

Spike actually wilted. And folded like a bad hand of poker behind Willy’s. “William Esmond Jamison Pratt, Mum,” he mumbled.

/Interesting./

Mom just nodded. “Fine. Now get these dishes clean, and I’ll think about forgiving you for marrying my daughter without even telling me you were going to do it.”

Shuffling forward, Spike nodded, looking about as hangdog as Buffy had ever seen him. “Absolutely, Mum.”

Buffy was fighting a case of the giggles when she was snapped out of it by the sharp clap beside her left ear. “You’re not off the hook either, young lady. Now, go get the rest of the stuff off the table, wipe it down, help William with the drying. I might forgive you sometime this week if things are spotless. And for God’s sake, one of you tell Dawn, because I’m not going to be in the room for the squealing.”

Jumping again, Buffy started for the table. Demons leaping out at her from behind tombs, no problem. Didn’t even ruffle her blood-pressure.

Mom on a tear? Liable to give her a heart attack.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
<3 <3 <3  
Seriously. I can't even handle these three.  
They give me LIFE.  
  
(side-note: i have completely insanely-long reasons for choosing the names I did for Spike, and they're elucidated at length in my other series. I might get into it in this one as well eventually, if I can find a place for an expository scene.)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, so... I gave y'all a warm-fuzzy chapter before we got to the tough stuff. But don't you worry. I refuse to let this fantastic family I've built get away without a fight.  
> (And I promise I will actually try to get on replying to y'all asap. RL is being a bear.)

They were getting ready to leave when it happened. Spike had just set his stack of finished dishes in the strainer preparatory to stepping away. Buffy was shaking out the towel to hang it by the oven when Mom approached and sighed heavily. “I’m still upset with both of you. But I firmly believe in ‘never go to bed angry’. So…” She opened her arms. “I love you, young man. You know that, right?”

Spike’s voice turned decidedly thick, and he swung around to stoop and literally bury his face in Mom’s hair. “I know, Mum,” he answered gruffly, and wrapped himself in her embrace.

Eventually Mom pulled back. It was clear from her body language she was about to turn to mend fences with Buffy next, though she surprised Spike first with a light kiss on his lips. 

At which point Spike froze as if she had stabbed him with something pointy. Buffy felt a rush of something like a vast, roaring horror blast through her, strong enough to freeze her in turn. It made her drop the dish towel without thought to swing around and stare as her guy very slowly straightened. “Joyce,” he whispered, and Buffy had never, ever heard his voice sound so terrified. “I need you to get your coat. We’re going to get in your car, or mine, right now. Buffy as well. We’re going to go to hospital.”

“Spike, what…” Buffy began, when she saw it.

His hands were shaking. All of him was shaking. And he had gone even more pale than he had any right to be; far more pale than normal. 

“Spike?” Mom asked, and her voice trembled. “Honey, what’s wrong? Why would we go to the hospital? And…”

He reached out, touched her cheek. “Joyce,  _ please.” _ His voice shook. 

She flinched a little. “God, your hands are so cold. I mean, colder than usual…”

“Spike?” Buffy whispered. She had just gotten a glimpse of his eyes. 

She had seen this carefully-contained panic-look in his eyes only twice before. The first had been when he had been bent over a bed while a vile bastard of a demon had been brutally raping him… and he had been trying to tell her to get away before they turned their attentions to her. The second had been when they were lost in the depths of the Initiative, and he had been quietly begging her to keep him out of their hands, at any cost; even if it meant dusting him to keep him from going back.

These were eyes that said ‘Don’t make me live through this again, seeing someone I care about suffer. I’ve already hurt enough’.

/Oh, God… What happened?/ “Mom,” Buffy heard herself whisper, “get in the car, please.”

Mom looked from one to the other of them, and her lips flattened to a thin line. “I need to know why, first.”

Buffy was pretty much with her mother, was about to put her own foot down, when she saw it, felt it. Spike closed his eyes, and Buffy felt a pang of pure agony slide through him on their link; so sharp it forestalled her. “I can’t say for sure yet,” he damn near whispered. “I’m just guessin’. Don’t wanna upset you more’n I already have. But I can smell certain things. Comes of bein’ a hunter. Smell what might be a certain illness on you, alright, Joyce?”

“Smelled…”

“On your breath.”

“Well, that’s just…” Mom looked embarrassed. “I even brushed.”

“Mom.” Buffy was starting to share Spike’s panic. It wouldn’t be something… /If he’s acting this way, it’s nothing to sneeze at. Especially since he’s working hard not to say what he thinks it is./ 

“Need a doc to confirm it…”

“And it can’t wait till tomorrow?” Mom sounded incredulous.

Spike bounced on his heels like a kid who had to pee, caught Mom’s eye with every line of his body emanating a fierce anxiety. “Joyce, I don’t wanna sound like a bad old vampire around you, but I bleedin’ love you, and if I have to pick you up and carry you to the sodding place kicking and screaming and have you never talk to me again, I will bloody well do it, and to hell with your dignity.”

Mom turned to Buffy and lifted her eyebrows. “This is the part of him I never get to see, huh? The part you say is kind of an asshole?”

The blunt question took Buffy by surprise, startled her out of her queasy ruminations. “Oh, that? No, that’s just him being overprotective and impulsive. ‘Kind of an asshole’ comes in when he casually insults me as a way to show me how he feels. I think it’s a British thing. The backhanded compliment deal, only with more sarcasm.”

“Oh.” Sighing, Mom turned back to Spike and spread her hands. “You’re not going to let this go, I gather.”

He crossed his arms stoically.

“Fine. I’ll go grab my purse. But I’m driving myself.”

***

The trip was a silent one. Spike didn’t try to take shotgun, longer legs or no, just planted himself behind Buffy and hung over her shoulder like an overeager puppy, as if he couldn’t handle being too far from his girls and was dying to get to their destination.

He was absolutely freaking out, keeping himself in check by some very thin hair of control. Just wow.

The second the Jeep pulled to a halt he was out, striding around to open the door for Mom and practically handing her out onto the tarmac. Buffy stared as he half-escorted, half-hustled her mother to the doors, Mom grumbling at him all the way about how she was enjoying his being a gentleman but she didn’t think it was necessary for him to practically carry her. 

He ignored her, had her inside an elevator while Buffy was still jogging to catch up and join them, and then was handing her into a seat in the third floor waiting area before either of them had a second to catch their breaths. 

And then he marched off without a backward glance to go harass the poor, tired-looking woman behind the nurse’s station. 

/Alright-y, then./

“Do you have any idea what he’s worried about, Buffy?” Mom demanded, now starting to get more than a little irritated.

“No,” Buffy answered, “but I’m about to find out.” And she stood to follow her guy toward the desk.

She was about halfway to closing the distance when she overheard his conversation. “Listen. I don’t bloody  _ care _ whether it’s normal hours. I know you’ve got someone on shift all the time, in every department. Now, you call me some sod from oncology to come down here right bloody  _ now _ , you  _ hear _ me?”

Buffy reeled back, grabbing at nothing for stability. / _ Oncology? _ /

“I’m sorry,  _ sir _ , but you can’t just demand that a doctor come to see you, without an appointment…”

He flashed fang. And in that moment, Buffy was way too numb to even care, much less take him to task. / _ Cancer? _ Mom has… Has…/

From what seemed like an incredibly long distance, she heard the nurse’s sharp yip of alarm. “I… I… I’ll call… security if you…”

Shaking off her stasis, Buffy strode forward and slapped her hand down on the desk. “Oncologist. Now. Please.” She shot a glance over her shoulder to where her mother sat watching them, a worried look on her face. /Can she hear us?/ “That’s my  _ mother _ over there.”

The nurse sighed and reached out for her phone. “I can try, but they’re usually busy this time of night with paperwork, catching up on the day’s cases. You’d be better off coming back in the morning…”

Spike’s subterranean growl hastened her dialing. 

“Yes, could you get Dr. Aarens to come up front here, please? We have an, um, emergency consultation… Yes, I know, but if he could please just come up for a few minutes… Alright, thank you.” The phone was replaced on its cradle and the nurse lifted her head to catch Buffy’s eye. She was spectacularly avoiding Spike’s gaze. “Dr. Aarens will be up shortly. Please wait over there.”

Pulling Spike away from the desk, Buffy dragged at his arm to turn him toward her. “Cancer?” she demanded, and could we talk about new levels of freak-outage? Her mouth was dry and the steak was roiling nauseously in her stomach like it was trying to crawl back up, and her palms were sweaty, and she felt super jittery, and…

Spike’s too-cold hand lifted, cupped her face. “Not sure, love. That’s why we’re here. Not sure if what I smelled… It was faint. When I’ve smelled it before it was… advanced. A lot more certain. But I sure the bloody hell don’t want it to get that way for her, if it’s…” His eyes fell closed, a thread of sick terror sliding between them. 

He drew in a sharp breath, then seemed to steady. When they opened again, his eyes were firm on hers, if more gray than blue. “I’m sorry, Buffy. Christ, your heart is goin’ at a bloody gallop.”

“Yeah, well…” Buffy closed her eyes briefly, let out a breath of her own. “I better go… talk to Mom. I didn’t mean to leave her alone. I just… promised I’d get answers from you.”

“Yeah. We should go… sit with her.”

They headed back to the waiting area.

“So, does anyone want to tell me what’s going on yet?” Mom asked as they arrived to flank her. She was trying for cheery, but there was a thread of iron under the tone that said someone better speak up really soon or there would be hell to pay.

Buffy opened her mouth, aware her heart had sped up to probably freight train speeds. Before she could say anything, though, a new voice intruded. “Hello, I’m Dr. Aarens. And you are?”

Mom spoke up first, clearly just done. “Joyce Summers.” Rising to meet the doctor, she stuck out her hand. “I’ve been railroaded here by my daughter and her boyfriend, and I have no idea why…” In her frustration she had completely forgotten the revelations of earlier.

“Oh?” The doctor’s eyes flitted from Buffy to Spike, looking interested.

Spike came to his feet at the same time as Buffy did. He had a determined air about him. “Doc, how long have you worked here? At this hospital?”

The doctor blinked briefly at this unexpected sally. “Ah, five years, about.”

“Done any rotations in the ER?”

Now he looked seriously taken aback. “A few. Why?”

Spike nodded sharply, and before Buffy could warn him off, he went full game face. “Then you know what I am.”

The doctor jumped… but not as high or as far as one might expect. “Oh, Jesus.”

/Oh, crap./ “Spike.”

The game face vanished, resolving back into safe human features. “So you’ll know what I’m telling you is true. I can smell things most humans can’t; and even those who can wouldn’t smell them when I can. Early on, when they wouldn’t be detectable. Comes of bein’ a hunter.”

Ashen-faced and trembling slightly, the doctor stilled, lifted his chin. “I… will accept that as an evolutionary reality.”

“Well, then,” Spike went on bullishly, “tonight I smelled something on my mother-in-law, here, that I would pray I’d never smell on anyone I loved. I dunno where it is, but it’s in her. It’s faint as yet, but it’s there. And you’re gonna find it before it’s not faint anymore.”  
  
/Oh God…/ “Spike, it sounds kind of needle-in-a-haystack if you don’t know…”

“He’s a specialist. He can figure it out. It’s his bloody job.”

Mom held up a hand. “Let me get this straight.” She turned to Spike. “You smelled some kind of illness on me; something serious enough to rush me down here in the middle of the night…”

Buffy opened her mouth; to defend Spike, maybe to tell her mother the reasons behind her guy’s panic. /He’s already lost a mother, Mom, is the thing. He’d die if he lost you too. Which we won’t. We  _ won’t! _ / 

Before she could speak, though, Mom was whirling back to the doctor. “What’s your specialty?”

The doctor looked startled. Clearly he would have thought she would already know. “Um… oncology, Ms. Summers.”

Mom flinched back, did a little stagger. Felt for the arms of the chair she had recently vacated, sat back down. “Oh.”

The silence dragged on for a second; embarrassment, worry, blooming fear. Then, gently, “The thing is, ma’am, though I’m not in any way doubting your son-in-law’s, ah… instincts, unless we have somewhere to focus, I’ll have no way of knowing where to look.”

“You’ll find it if you have to search her entire bloody body,” Spike snarled, and made to grab the doctor’s lapels. He was raging, the flash of panic-fear-anger boiling over in him and turning off every ounce of control he had earned during the course of nearly a year’s relationship with the Slayer. “I’ll drain you dry if you don’t. I’m not losing another woman I love to some sodding disease. God help me if I’ll just stand by again while another mum of mine withers away…”

Instinct flared. Buffy snapped her hands to his, peeled them off the man’s lapels before he could slam the poor doctor against the wall. “Spike. Let. Go.”

The command she never thought she would use on him kicked in. His hands snapped open immediately, and he sagged, shaking.

The worst part was, he had just attacked a terrified human, and all Buffy could feel right now was pain, for him, because she could  _ feel _ his anguish. It echoed her own, but his wasn’t numb with shock. It was the agony of someone who had been here, seen and felt things she never wanted to, and... 

Turning his body with her hand, she pulled him against her, because it didn’t matter whether what she was feeling was his or her own. It was all the same. The impotence, the terror, the agony and the desperation. “Come here.”

He did, and clung hard to her thin leather jacket. Buried his face in her neck. “Oh, Christ, Buffy.”

“His mother died of cancer?” Mom asked softly, from over his shoulder.

Stroking his hair, the back of his neck, Buffy jerked her head slightly in negation. “Tuberculosis. But that was the eighteen-eighties, so you know. No cure.”

Voice shaking, Dr. Aarens straightened his lab coat and cleared his throat. “Well, technically there’s still no catch-all cure for TB; just some very aggressive treatments which eventually hope to clear up all the bacteria in the system and lead to remission. One might always be a carrier. As to this…” Turning to Mom, he straightened resolutely. “Perhaps we can narrow it down. Ah, Ms. Summers, have you been having any… odd symptoms lately that you might have put down to something else? Anything at all; changes to menstruation, bad cramps, odd headaches, strange aches or pains in any joints, nausea of any kind…”

“The headaches,” Mom answered, looking pensive. “Just a few, but all on the left side, and a little more intense than normal. I’d put them down to stress, though honestly things haven’t been all that stressful lately. I mean, I have help in the gallery now, Dawn—my younger daughter—is doing well in school, my older daughter is in a positive relationship and has help with her dangerous job, so I have to worry less about her. Of course I’m still fighting their father for child support, but that’s been going on for years, so nothing new there, and of course the mortgage and car payments, but you know. Life. Everything seems to be going fairly well. I just figured… who knows.”

Spike straightened in Buffy’s arms, turned with her to glare at Mom. Buffy pinched his arm hard to keep him from saying anything. “Mom,” she said instead, “how long have you been having these headaches?”

“Oh, Buffy, not long. Just really in the last week. And they’re really nothing that serious…” 

“Why didn’t you  _ tell _ me?” 

“Baby, they’re just headaches. And you’ve had so much going on…”

“And this is a  _ hellmouth! _ Mom!”

“This is a what, now?”

Buffy ignored the startled doctor. “No matter what Spike and I have going on, it’s never too big for you to tell us if you’re having a health problem, no matter how small it seems, okay?”

Mom started to speak, but Buffy was already spinning to talk to the doc. “Can we, like, check for this?”

“Well, the first thing we’ll do is a neurological exam, of course. Check your reflexes, eyesight, coordination, et cetera. That way we can determine if your functioning has been affected in any serious way. Any impacts can give me an indication of the possible location of the… mass, if it exists, and may confirm the likelihood of its being the culprit of the headaches. Then we have blood tests, et cetera…”

Mom was nodding, looking as if she’d been hit by something heavy. She had that ‘steeling herself’ look, though; the one that said she was trying to rally and be tough. “So you’ll want me to come back and…”

“Well… since you’re here, we might as well get started tonight, if you want to. At least it might ease your mind so you can get some sleep. Do we have your insurance on file here?”

“Oh.” Mom looked startled, then thoughtful. “Um, yes. Between my daughters and myself we’ve been in here often enough.” 

“Well then, if you want to have a quick exam we can draw blood, you can give a urine sample, and we can do a quick test of your reflexes…” 

“That doesn’t sound very invasive.” Mom nodded, pulled in a deep breath. “Alright.”

Buffy caught her hand, squeezed it. “You want me to come?”

Anxious hazel eyes shot over to meet hers. “Oh, I don’t think so, Buffy. I’m fine. You and Spike can wait out here.”

“Okay.”

Mom signed something at the desk, officially checking in, then followed Dr. Aarens back. Spike remained on his feet, literally vibrating beside Buffy. After they vanished behind the card-controlled doors, she tugged at his arm. “Sit with me?”

Spike jerked his head once in negation. “Need a smoke, pet. Can’t sit.”

“Oh.” Buffy felt a little deflated at the thought of sitting there on her lonesome, without a hand to hold. Even a totally freaked-out vampire hand. It was tough, trying to be the together one, to remain calm while everyone around her spazzed. /But someone has to./

“You want to come?”

She blinked at him in surprise. “No, I, uh, should stay. In case they come back out.”

“Should take a bit, love. You’ve time to take some air.”

She was shaking her head before he had even finished speaking. “No, I… I’ll stay.”

He seemed startled, but nodded, still vibrating with tension. “Alright. I’ll… bring you back something. From the machines. Coke or summat?”

“Yeah. Sure. Okay.” She felt distant from the idea, didn’t even know if she wanted something like a Coke this late, but she would take the offering in the spirit it was given.

He disappeared in the direction of the stairwell. She remained, clinging to her knees. The clock ticked by on the wall. The single attendant shuffled around the nurse’s station, occasionally glancing over at her. No one else populated the room, which was denuded of patients at this late hour. 

Time washed over her at a backward pace, like it was stalled. 

Spike came back eventually, set a bag of pretzels and a Coke at her elbow, then paced. She wanted to tell him to quit it, but couldn’t speak. 

Then Mom was poking her head out of the door to catch their eyes. She was wearing a paper gown. What…

Buffy shot up, jogged over, Spike in her wake. “Why are you still…”

“Dr. Aarens wants me to do a CT scan.”

A chill worked its way down Buffy’s spine, settled heavy in her stomach. “What; tonight?”

“Yes. He thinks it’s best to do it now, so we’ll have something definitive to look at in case we need to… make plans tomorrow, or get on any schedules.”

“Oh. That’s…” Closing her eyes, she felt herself reeling back against Spike. He caught her, hands lifting automatically, but he didn’t stroke or squeeze. He seemed as numb as she felt, all she received from him in that moment a sort of fizzing, stunned blankness.

“It’s just… He called it ‘expedient’.” Mom seemed… calm, as her eyes flicked from Buffy’s to Spike’s and back again. “Anyway, I’m sorry, but it’ll probably be another forty-five minutes. Maybe an hour…”

“No, that’s… That’s fine…”

“Yeah.” Spike’s voice was hoarse, almost breathy. “We’ll just wait out here. You ah… You need anything, Joyce? Can get you something from the machines, or…”

Mom smiled slightly. “I’m fine, Spike. We just had dinner.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Buffy blinked when Mom turned back to pat her hand. “Be back out soon. Hang in there, baby.”

“Oh, I’m… fine.  _ You _ hang in there.” /God, what a dumb thing to say./

“Okay, honey.” Her head pulled in like a turtle’s, and she disappeared.

They stood there for a moment, frozen. And then Spike was clearing his throat behind Buffy. “That’s good, right? They’re makin’ sure. Tonight. Not wastin’ any time…” He was tense, though. Pulled back, giving away nothing.

“Yeah. Right. Good.” Words weren’t making a whole lot of sense to Buffy right now. 

“Yeah. So we just… wait.” Suiting action to words, Spike turned to head back toward the chairs. He didn’t sit, though; just stood there, staring down at them as if they were some kind of inanimate nemesis. 

Buffy followed. Watched him for a moment, the distance between herself and him, between herself and the moment stretching thin and thinner, threatening to break. If it did, she would float away. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t hear anything, she could barely see. 

“Dammit, Spike,” she heard herself gasp, “I need you with me. I can’t…” God, even her voice sounded distant to her ears. “I’m floating away.” /And if I do, I might not come back./

He jerked hard. Turned to her. And realization struck him, as visibly as if she had slapped him across the face. His eyes closed briefly. “Oh, hell.” And he was striding close, had her hand, was yanking her into his arms. She clung to him, and, oh. Was he supposed to feel… almost warm? He usually only felt like this after prolonged contact--read, sex--or when he’d bitten her, and their temperatures had equalized briefly. Did that mean their temperatures were similar right now? How could that have…

“Christ, you’re cold, love. Bloody hell; you’re in some sort of sodding shock. And of course I’m no bleedin’ help. Fuck. Here. Just sit here a mo’, alright?” Setting her down in the closest seat, he strode away toward the nurse’s station, voice intense. He seemed to be arguing about something.

Buffy couldn’t think about anything but that he was missing from her arms. Didn’t want to think about anything else. Couldn’t…

Something warm settled around her shoulders, wrapped her up tight. /Oh, wow./

Everything in her abruptly relaxed into the sensation of warmth. “There we are, pet. Wrangled you one of those heated blankets. Took some doing. Slappers as run things up here bloody well hoard the things. Had to flash fang again to get it.” And then he had an arm around her again, outside the balmy, thin length of cheap cloth, was tugging her close to bring her into the curve of his chest. “Christ, I’m that sorry, love. Sorry I left you alone. I was lost in my own fears. It was unconscionable of me, especially knowing where you’d have gone. This is your mum. That was bloody well unforgivable, and I’ll not ask it, but I’m here now.”

“I don’t…” Shaking her head, Buffy bit her lip. “I get it. I just… I need you. I need us to be in this together.”

“Absolutely.”

He held her throughout the remainder of that endless hour, and she held him; buried in his chest, her arms wrapped around his ribs, her face against his throat and his lips in her hair, one hand moving along her spine in long, repetitive strokes that seemed to have forgotten their genesis and might never find their ending. It was a kind of meditation, and they were both lost enough in it that when the voice came, calling from the doorway, it surprised them both. “Miss, ah, Summers, is it? Or…”

Buffy bounded up so fast she almost knocked them both over coming to her feet. “Uh, yeah, what? Is there…”

“Mrs. Summers has asked you both to come back.”

They followed the orderly, a young guy with dark hair and green scrubs, through the doors and into a maze of desks and corridors, past bank after bank of exam rooms. “Your mother is over here in Quad B with Dr. Aarens. She’s in good hands. He’s one of our best diagnosticians. I’ve learned a lot from him so far during my residency.”

Oh. So, not an orderly. “Thanks. Um, good to know.” Buffy felt wooden, incapable of normal social interaction.

“Alright, here we are. Seven-B.”

“Thank you, uh…”

“Ben. I hope everything goes well for you.” Ben gave a little nod and showed himself out.

Pulling aside the curtain impatiently, Spike rapped on the very white wall. “You decent, Joyce?” he called roughly.

“Yes. Come on in.”

The room wasn’t your standard exam room with a bed and stuff. It was one of those ones for looking at x-rays. The walls were all white, and there were those clippy-things all around at eye-level. Several of them were taken up with pictures of a skull, all glowy, stuck there on the wall. Mom stood there, in front of the pictures, looking too small in her paper gown and robe. 

Buffy wanted to hug her, but she felt intimidated. The effect of the room was very weird. Antiseptic and distancing; like they were all in their own separate bubbles. “Mom?”

“Oh, hey baby. Spike.” She didn’t turn. “Dr. Aarens will be back in a sec. He went to get some paperwork.” She sounded sort of distant. Almost dreamy. 

“Okay?” Buffy drew a step closer, eyes on the brain-pictures. “What, um…”

Mom turned to face them, and wow, she looked drawn, though her smile was there. It was one of those ‘brave’ smiles. The ones that tried too hard to be strong, oh god. “I have a shadow. I’m not sure what that means, but I suppose we’ll find out. It can’t be too bad, because the shadow’s apparently pretty tiny, and thanks to Spike, we caught it very early…”

“It’s an extremely small shadow,” Dr. Aarens broke in, stepping in past the curtain. His tiny, perfunctory knock barely preceded him as he set some papers down on the slip of a counter and moved to join Mom over by the x-rays. “In a month or two it likely would have doubled in size. Detecting it now has saved a lot of pain and heartache, and perhaps a great deal of danger. You’ll have to consult a neurologist, of course, to confirm, but I’ll have to say that from what I’ve seen in the past, this doesn’t look to be pressing against any important blood vessels as yet. It’s really very miniscule; perhaps a centimeter and a half by two centimeters…”

The room, the pictures, it all seemed to vanish in a tide of rushing that swamped Buffy’s mind; a rushing that was ramping up to a roaring. “So… shadow is code for… For tumor?” She barely felt her lips move as she said it.

“Not necessarily malignant,” Mom pointed out quickly. “They’ll do a biopsy. We’ll schedule that first, to see. And to figure out the growth rate. To see if… there needs to be surgery. And then…” Her eyes flickered to Dr. Aarens.

“I apologize that I won’t be the one to follow you throughout all of treatment for this,” Dr. Aarens broke in quietly. “I’m an oncologist, and if you want me to be, I can continue to be your oncologist as you move forward with your treatment… but I’m not a neurologist. I can’t perform your surgery, if the neuros decide that’s indicated…” He lightly touched Mom’s shoulder. “Which from my end, sounds like it might be, but it will depend on many things. Type, for one. Once they make that determination, we’ll know whether they’ll be shunting you back to me, or moving forward with you to plan surgical intervention.” A slight, encouraging smile. “But even then, this little guy is so small and you caught it so soon, thanks to your son-in-law, that you’re unlikely to be at any great risk. And once you get out of surgery, you’ll be back in my wheelhouse, if you want to stick with me going forward. If not, no hard feelings, since obviously you only got me tonight because I was on call.”

“That’s very kind of you, Dr. Aarens. Thank you. I…” Mom let out an anxious little breath. “I suppose I should, uh, go get scheduled, then.”

“I’ll let them know up front.” He gave her a nod. “You’ve been a star through all this, Joyce. Hang in there, and call me with any questions. Feel free, I mean it. They have my card at the desk.” 

“Alright. Thank you, Doctor.”

On his way out, Dr. Aarens paused next to Spike. “Have you, ah… ever considered moonlighting as a diagnostician? You or any of your, ah… compatriots? You could save a lot of lives.”

Spike’s lips twitched, though his eyes remained on Mom. “Never gave it much thought. Most of my type aren’t heavily invested in saving lives, unfortunately.”

“Ah. Pity.” Turning, the doctor slipped around the curtain to depart the room.

“Well,” Mom murmured, breaking the silence, “I’m definitely glad that Dawn stayed at Janice’s tonight.”

/Oh, wow; Dawn./ “When… When are we gonna tell her?”

Mom shook her head a little, her voice sounding as strange and distant as Buffy felt. “Let’s wait till we know what the plan is. Then…” Her eyes jerked up to meet theirs. “At least we have both good news and bad news to give her.” And there was the patented, depreciating Mom-smile. “Maybe she’ll be so distracted by yours that she’ll miss mine.”

“Mom…” Buffy gasped, taken aback. It felt like a spear through the heart. So much had happened since their discussion at dinner that that felt like another day; another week, even.

Mom caught her limp hand, patted it, sounding terrifyingly calm. “Baby, I don’t want you to lose sight of what’s happening; either of you. Not yet. Right now we’re still just diagnosing. We’re twenty steps away from knowing anything.” 

Buffy felt simultaneously like tearing her hand away from her mother’s and screaming, throwing herself on the woman who’d raised her and crying and begging her never to leave her, or maybe just running away. How was she being so calm like this? Was it all a front? It had to be, right?

The moment Mom dropped her hand with a squeeze Buffy stepped back to fetch up hard, against Spike’s chill, solid form, felt his hand clench tightly around her bicep. Glancing up automatically to check in with him, she saw the muscles working in his jaw, knew he was just as unnerved by Mom’s reactions. Maybe more so than she. And felt, through the contact, his emotions, blunted before by the haze that had surrounded her. 

What was coming from Spike now was an anguished recognition. 

He had seen this before. All of this. 

/No./

The rest of the visit seemed to resolve itself in a kind of daze. They stepped out while Mom dressed, mutually silent and lost. She exited with her paperwork and they trailed her like newly-claimed shelter pets being led to the front desk, where she discussed dates and times with the nurses there. Apparently most of the operating bays were booked solid for biopsies for weeks, but they would put her on standby for the next available one, should anyone fall off the list, and would Mom lose all the time she had gained from Spike’s special intervention while she cooled her heels waiting for an OR table to open up? Would the stupid tumor grow really huge while she waited for them to get a look at the thing? “We’ll have you in in the interim, of course, to monitor the mass,” the nurse told Mom from some great distance. “Once every three days is preferable, to keep an eye on it with CT scans…”

“Oh. Well. Is that really necessary?”

/Do they have to call it a ‘mass’?/ ‘Shadow’ was ridiculous dance-y around the truth language, like gentle baby-talk… but mass just seemed all… loom-y and terrifying.

“It’s in Dr. Aarens’ orders. It gives us a baseline, and of course if the mass exhibits inordinate growth, we’d move you up to OR status immediately. Also, remaining in touch with our staff here will help if your headaches become unmanageable with OTC medications…”

“Oh. Well. That makes sense, I suppose…”

“Could you make it in for an appointment on Friday?”

“Oh. I… I’ll have to rearrange a meeting, but I’ll speak to my gallery manager and…”

Buffy clenched her fingers down on Spike’s hand, hard enough to leave bruises. He clung back, just as hard. 

On the way home they were a silent bunch. Once they gained the house, Mom went into the kitchen without bothering to turn on the light. In the reflected glow of the streetlamps outside she leaned over the counter for a moment, then pulled out a glass and ran herself a tall glass of water while they hovered anxiously near the island, uncertain what to do or how to act. 

Mom drank her water very slowly before she turned to them. “Now,” she told them flatly, and gave them both a stern, gimlet glare, “I don’t want you two hanging around me like a couple of mother hens. I can drive myself to this next appointment, and let you know how it goes, and I can take care of myself in the meantime…” 

Buffy opened her mouth to protest, felt Spike inflating to do the same. They were both cut off by a very firm flash of bright eyes in the dimness, and by the uncompromising tones of Mom’s voice. “I am a grown adult. I understand that you are both very concerned, but this is happening to  _ me _ , and I would very much prefer to go on with my life as previously scheduled, without feeling like I have some sort of executioner’s axe hanging over my head.” 

Buffy flinched. She wasn’t the only one. 

“We don’t even know if it’s anything that dire. So.” Mom set aside the glass, her every move exceedingly businesslike. “Don’t stay here tonight. Go; go to the dorm, or to Spike’s place. I’m fine. Dawn should be home soon, and if she sees how you two are acting, she’ll figure out that something’s wrong, and I really don’t feel like explaining this to her till tomorrow when I have a clearer head.”

“Mom…” Buffy gasped, incredulous.

Mom caught her eye, softened slightly. “I need to sleep on it. We can talk to her about it when she gets home from school tomorrow. I’m going to need your help with that,” she finished, for the first time with a faint note of pleading for Buffy.

Buffy quailed. She didn’t know if she was in any way up for that. For being an adult. For facing Dawnie and helping to explain… For holding it together. /This is my mommy too!/ 

Mom’s eyes remained on hers for a moment, seeking. Whatever she found seemed to confirm something for her. Her eyes lifted to Spike’s. “And I think you two need to get your heads on straight about it too, or neither of you are going to be any good in the conversation. And Dawn’s going to need all of us acting like adults, not scared children, when we tell her about this.”

Spike spoke up for the first time. “Understood, Mum.” His voice was a hair rough, but mostly stoic.

Buffy couldn’t fathom leaving the house tonight. “Mom, I…”

Spike had his hand on her arm, was urging her toward the back door. “C’mon, love. Mum needs some time to herself to process. And so do we.”

Buffy swung half around to stare at him, shocked and betrayed. “Wh…”

“G’night, Joyce.”

“Goodnight, Spike. Buffy. I love you.”

“Love you too, Mum.”

Buffy was being dragged out the door. At first she was too stunned even to register what was happening well enough to fight back. By the time she had fully come out of her fog, she was already outside; on the back porch and stumbling down the two small steps to the lawn. “What the  _ hell!” _ she demanded, jerking her arm out of Spike’s iron grip, and turned to head back toward the door. To find that it had closed behind them. 

She stared at it for a moment, floored, then made to march up the step. No way she was going to leave her mother alone tonight. She was going to stay here, and then tomorrow…

Spike grabbed her and yanked her back down, so that she half-stumbled back to the lawn. “Got to respect Mum’s wishes, pet,” he informed her in tight, clipped tones.

Buffy didn’t think. She couldn’t. Besides, she knew those tones, the feeling behind them, lurking in her blood. He’d known she was going to do it, before she had even known it herself. 

She swung.

He blocked her, caught the fist, pulled it down. “Sorry, love. And we can fight about it if you need to. I wouldn’t mind a brawl myself. I’m right brassed at the world…”

Buffy swung again, with her free hand. 

And was blocked once more. And for the record, fighting when your opposite number could feel what you were feeling, could sense your impulses, was kind of unfair. 

It actually royally pissed her off. “Right now I’m mad at  _ you _ ,” Buffy grated, and ripped her right fist free to step back and try for a front-kick. 

He blocked that easily too, and grinned ferally, releasing her to crouch with hands out, fingers hooked like claws. “Alright, then,” he growled back… and dove at her.

It was messy. It was ugly. It was no-holds-barred. It was the first real fight they had had since he’d had the Gem of Amara. They’d sparred, sure, but nothing real. Nothing where Buffy had really let go. Right now she didn’t care about anything, though, but the terror and the grief, and…

And she kind of thought Spike didn’t either. 

It also went exactly nowhere, since between nine-plus months of regular sparring, and the fact that they could literally read exactly what each other was going to do next, neither was capable of getting a shot in against one another no matter how hard they tried. When he swung at her she could sense the impulse before he did it; which hand, even, how low or how high. When he kicked, or spun behind her, she felt it coming; and he could do the same with her. They anticipated each other’s moves without thought. Not one single hit landed, every single one was dodged—which was fatiguing—or blocked—which was incredibly frustrating—and in the end, after twenty solid minutes of going nowhere, they ended up trying for a throw at the same time that resolved into their simply grappling full-force, teeth bared and glaring, boots and shoes digging hard into the lawn until grass was torn up in clods. And neither went down or over a shoulder, and they were gasping and groaning and straining and…

Buffy was technically the stronger. But Spike had been living off of human blood, if not fresh, topped off very recently with a nip of Slayer blood, and was stronger than he had ever been in Buffy’s memory… and Buffy was distracted. Emotional. 

They went down at the same time, collapsing to the grass in a cascade of leather and limbs, like a house of cards. 

Buffy was exhausted. And she realized with a vague horror that she had begun crying in there somewhere, and she had no damn clue when she’d started. “I’m sorry,” she heard herself whisper.

“Don’t be,” Spike answered without moving a muscle. His voice was exceptionally raw-sounding. “You’re bloody terrified. So’m I. And it pisses us both off no end.” 

“Yeah.” God, she was a mess. 

She was getting snot on his duster.

They lay there in a crumpled heap of limbs, for how long Buffy had no idea. She found herself staring at the sky, a faint skim of stars visible behind the slight wrack of cloud over to the left and the constant glow of the city. Her cheek and nose were pillowed on the part of the duster opposite the inside right pocket. Consequently his flask was pressed hard against her cheekbone, the ridge of the closure just palpable against the edge of her nasal bone. It was thoroughly uncomfortable, even with a layer of leather in between it and her flesh, but she didn’t move. 

Eventually, though, she realized she should probably find something to wipe her nose and rescue the leather. It would really suck if the thing survived being covered in demon goop and who knew what for twenty years, only to be ruined by Buffy-snot. “Do you have a handkerchief or something?” It was a long shot. It wasn’t like Spike had any reason to carry anything like that.

He fumbled in the far-left pocket, though, and handed her a few paper napkins from some fast food place, printed logo illegible in the darkness. “Handkerchiefs are for gentlemen, Slayer. Best I can do.”

“I’ll take it.” She blew her nose, then mopped up his coat and sat with the crumpled excuse for a tissue folded in her hand. And met his eyes, feeling weirdly ashamed. 

That was, until she saw his face, glistening with tears in the low light. “Let’s get the bloody hell out of here,” he suggested roughly.

“Okay.”

They didn’t go back to the dorm, and Buffy did not patrol. They went directly to the crypt, where they held each other for hours, Buffy unable to speak and Spike unable to leave her or find any solace elsewhere. 

At some point, late in the night, they made love, wordlessly seeking comfort in each other. Comfort was hard to find… but they did their best. Sunrise, when it came, was both yearned for, as the first day ticked off the calendar… and really not all that much help. It was very bright, after all, and filled with truths no one was ready to face.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
And, off we go on the cancer arc. It lasts a few chapters.   
I think Spike would rather eat that tumor raw than let anything happen to Joyce, and now that they know what's the what, and they're, like, a month and a half early on detection, I think we have a good chance of changing said arc, what with a determined, more knowledgeable Buffy with strong support at her side, etc.   
Cross your fingers, y'all!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, warnings...  
> Not a lot aside from some brain stuff near the end. Only a little tiny bit of pondering thoughts about things between how Spike's stuff went and how Joyce's biopsy is going and that sort of thing... nothing in any real depth, but in case that's a squick, there's a spot where Buffy runs to the bathroom to splash some water on her face, and that would be the moment to disengage till the next set of ***.   
> (btw, kudos to the ever-amazing wolf_shadoe for navigating around that bit whilst being the fantabulous beta she is; you RAWK, wolf_shadoe!)
> 
> Really getting into it here, though we leaven it in the beginning with fun stuff with Dawn.

“Are you ready for this?”

“No.” Spike was tight-lipped around his cigarette; as unsettled as she had ever seen him. As unsettled as she felt. 

Their shared emotions eddied between them, making it difficult to know where they originated, or even who was feeling what, exactly. It was the downside of their claim.

“I kinda wish something would pop up and ask to die,” Buffy admitted softly as they neared the house. It was the first time either of them had said anything for another long stretch; maybe fifteen minutes. They had decided against taking the car; a mutual though unspoken decision that the exertion and the moving—if not remotely fresh—air would do them good. 

Buffy hadn’t done well in class today, zoning out so frequently that eventually each of her professors had called her out on it. Wil had stared at her in amazement during Sociology, and she had ended up telling her Spanish professor that she had to leave because of a family emergency. 

Thank goodness she didn’t have her Lit class today. Spike would never let her hear the end of it if she walked out on the Keats unit. /Not even if the world was burning down./

Instead she had been able to hurry back to the crypt with a clear conscience, to curl up with him downstairs and seek the oblivion of silence in his cool embrace and the stillness of not-thought for a few more hours until Dawnie was due to come home from school. Spike hadn’t said a word when she’d arrived almost an hour early from campus; merely stood, tilted his head at the droning television—he’d been watching some crappy game show with clear inattention—and when she’d shaken her head, feeling dazed and too wide-eyed, he’d nodded, taken her hand, and tugged her downstairs to cradle her, and her him, in the kind of silence that made any words unnecessary.

Now, though… “Yeah,” he answered quietly. “Could do with a spot of violence m’self. Course, no one’s coming beggin’, down here.”

Buffy made a face for the locale. After all, it wasn’t sunset yet, necessitating a journey by underground demon railroad. However, did that really mean they couldn’t meet up with some other demon using the highway for a nice stroll; one out for nefarious and not-innocent purposes? 

/Just my luck, if we do run into one, it’ll be, like, a Brachen or a Torflinn or something, and it’ll touch its cap, give a little bow and step aside for us to pass and mind its own business while the Slayer and the Master go on about ours. Dammit./ 

What really happened though was the dank-n-stanky tunnels remained disappointingly unpeopled by any variety of other comers; probably mostly because of the locale. Revello wasn’t in an area of Sunnydale frequented much by the demon community in the first place; not even after last year’s big population shake-up. Which probably had a lot to do with the fact that this was the part of town the Slayer called home at least part-time, because stir that in and most of the demon underground tended to steer clear, even now that Buffy had spent a solid nine months trying to get on more equable, straightforward, and clear-cut terms with the world that was her charge. 

It was a work in progress. Jumping in to capitalize on the grudging goodwill she and Spike and the Scoobies had earned in the wake of kicking out the Initiative, and in filling that power vacuum… it had worked for them, to an extent. Still, there had been a lot of damage to repair in the PR department, dating from years past. And, of course, she still had a job to do, and that job came with certain setbacks in said public relations gig. /Like when you have to kill someone’s brother for throwing in with a baby-smuggling ring, and it really hurts a family that’s otherwise inoffensive because he was their only breadwinner, because the line I draw is no baby-smuggling. No budging on that one, sorry. But what can I do about the starving demon-family missing a brother? He wasn’t going to stop, okay? It was the only way he knew how to make fast cash!/ 

She’d even tried to get the family an in with a couple of the local realtors in town who knew about the demon thing, and had Spike put the next-oldest kid in touch with some demon he knew with a really bad growth over on eye who he said ran a restaurant or something. After all, some of the realtors around town were so desperate for renters since the whole Hellions thing that they’d take anyone, human or no (half the humans in town and not a few of the demons had bailed after that whole fiasco)… and apparently there was this whole thing with the restaurant guy where, even if he was going to turn down the resident Master vamp, he’d once dated Anya and was willing to do a favor with a little combination bribery-slash-flirting-slash-apologies for who knew what past misdeeds (and Buffy didn’t want to know, thanks). 

Still. That kind of convolutedness? Talk about a lot more work she hadn’t asked for, a lot more headaches and time spent that she had never considered or had to deal with before, and a lot more overtime. And the gray areas and the intertwined everything really made her job harder when it came to keeping up decent relations with the demon community. 

Also, the demon community? A lot more spread out these days, a lot less concentrated just around Willys-slash-the-Warehouse-District-slash-the-Docks; which was more fair, but also made it a lot tougher to keep tabs on what might be going on behind her back. It kept her and Spike running, made keeping up with school almost impossible—or would if she didn’t have this fabbo, uber-smart vampire tutor around to help her with her essays and to make sense of the poetry—and really, all of this extra work would have been impossible if she didn’t, A, have Spike as her partner all laying down the no-sirings-without-prior-approval law; B, have Willy on her side as informant (though they all knew he played both sides of that game when it profited him. He was too useful for her to strangle even when he majorly pissed her off); and, C, if things weren’t so relatively quiet in comparison to years past. 

The up-front workload really did cut back by about thirty percent when you didn’t have half the town pissed off at you and ready to come at you without question, no holds barred, every second, and totally spoiling for a fight. Heck, she spent more time in standoffs with demons these days, warily watching them across a cemetery while they watched her. Instead of automatically charging each other like they used to, they would end up just nodding stiffly most times and turning away instead of that immediate, roaring attack for no other reason than that they both existed in the same space.

It was weird, and almost more stressful  _ not _ knowing what to expect with every encounter, but at least  Buffy was starting to get used to not having to fight everyone. Though, Spike often had to massage her shoulders after such encounters just to bring her down from DefCon twelve or whatever, because she couldn’t get out her frustrated confusion in a nice brawl, and five times out of ten she came home to him either bewildered… or just flat out pissed off at the lack of follow-through.

Not that he wasn’t willing to provide another kind of follow-through if she needed it. Spike was always more than willing to be her stand-in, with the rough-and-tumble… and the rough-and-tumble. 

Between the bizarrely equivocal hostilities and the fact that she didn’t have those dumb commando assholes messing things up around campus anymore, her job had become almost… periodic rather than constant. Though, taking the campus off the list was also nice from a ‘I don’t need this thing to be even more decentralized’ perspective. Having another center of evil dumbassery to cope with on top of everything else would have been just one center too many on top of all the diffuse new little demon-home and -apartment clusters popping up all over town. Instead of regular commando shenanigans, quick sweeps here and there once a week while she was heading through campus on the way down to Restfield did the trick. 

/You’d think having the Initiative gone would mean the numbers would go up and my job would be harder./ Actually, though, it was almost like her having helped get rid of those military jackasses had earned her and Spike enough cred that the petty troublemakers of demon-land had settled down a bit, were giving her some respite out of respect. Her campus patrols mostly turned up dim-witted vamps with crap hunting skills trying to pick off the easy game of drunken co-eds staggering out of keggers—easy enough to plan for those, since keggers tended to happen on specific nights of the week—and the occasional ‘fraternity brothers trying to raise a demon for fame and fortune’ thing.

It wasn’t like the college was chock full of graveyards spitting out fledges or anything. Not even Sunnydale’s twelve cemeteries and bazillion or whatever funeral parlors were churning out anything like their usual numbers of late. Spike was really laying down the law when it came to his whole ‘babies making babies’ policy. His second rule, ‘your-unattended-or-ill-behaved-fledge-gets-staked-and-so-do-you’ was making a pretty big impression on the vamps in town who had sired fledges constantly like it was a dare, or some attempt to overrun the Slayer just to see how long she could stick it out. A few stakings of the biggest offenders by the town’s Master, a few forceful ‘you made your fledge, now lay in it’ type-lessons had made serious impact in the vamp world, and the graveyards were starting to act like… Well. Places of rest.

Heck. Patrols were getting downright boring of late. Which made nights like this just really suck when it came to needing a distraction. 

They reached the grate outside the house without meeting a one, and Buffy sighed heavily. “You know, when I took that public speaking class, I thought it would help me be more ‘with the words’ girl. Not so much. It might have helped me with talking to those idiots at Willy’s, but when it comes to people I care about I’m still foot-in-mouth Buffy.” She closed her eyes, a wash of fear-anguish crashing over her. “I’m not sure I can do this, Spike.” /What if I don’t hold it together? What if…/

“You’ve been better than you think lately when it comes to the words bit, pet,” Spike told her softly. “And it’s not just you doin’ it. It’s the both of us. And Mum. We’ll manage.” He cupped her elbow, nudged her upward. “Any road, the way you set all that lot back on their heels last week was a sight to see. You’re definitely a sight better at gettin’ your point across than you believe.”

Buffy opened her eyes and stared up the ladder, setting her feet and hands firmly on the rungs. “That’s intimidation,” she reminded him grimly. “I have to be compassionate today. And you know me. I either feel or I turn off. Dawn…” She bit her lip. “She deserves not-turned-off Buffy. But if I don’t turn off…”

“Then you cry. And she’ll appreciate that you’re showin’ her you’re scared with her.”

/Dammit./ “I need to be the strong one. I can’t leave Mom alone with this. She needs me to help her be strong.” God, Buffy felt so trapped. She just wanted to crawl into Mom’s lap and be held, patted, told it would be alright as Dawn would no doubt be. /But I’m the oldest. I never get that luxury. I have to be the strong one. I have to…/

Spike’s hand closed over hers on the rung, catching her attention. The whirl of emotion in him arrested her utterly as it tore through her; understanding and a vast well of old, knowing pain. “You hold back as much as you need to, love, so you can be there for them. And you open up as much as you can, so you can be there for them; else after, you realize you weren’t, and you regret it all your days, how much you missed, protectin’ yourself, when it ends.”

/Oh God… Don’t you see?/ “That’s what you’re good at,” she heard herself tell him quietly. “You can give yourself like that. I… I don’t know how to.”

He brushed her cheek, nodded. “You did all or nothing once or twice, pet, and it broke you. So you’ve mostly landed on nothing. But you have learned to temper. You do it with me. And those moments when you do give me all… they’re few and far between, but you do it; and you don’t know how I treasure it, knowin’ what it means.” His hand dropped away, and he favored her with a sad little smile. “You do it with Mum, too…” 

“Sometimes.” It troubled her, how little it happened, even now.

“More than you know.” He took her hand. “You can also give that to Dawn, you know. She’s not going anywhere.” He squeezed her fingers gently. “She’s been yours since Mum put her in your arms when she was a day old.”

Buffy bit her lip and turned away, shaking. He knew her too well, sometimes. “Let’s get this over with.”

“I love you, Buffy.”

Buffy bit her lip, nodded, still facing away. “I know. I love you.” The emotions surged up in spite of her. “And I have no idea how you’re doing this again. How you did it even once. How…”

“I don’t either.” He halted briefly, then, voice trembling slightly, “But maybe I’m not. That’s what I’m holdin’ on to.”

/Okay, I’m gonna hold on to that with you./ It was stupid, but it was all she had. /I can deal with death all day and night, every day. But after the thing with Angel, and Merrick, and Ford…/ She couldn’t with Mom, too. She just couldn’t. 

The swift dash to the house, racing the sunset, was a nice, mindless exercise in adrenaline. It brought them panting to the front porch, where they huddled, Spike hard up against the siding while Buffy got the door open and shoo’d him in. “Hey, Mom. Dawn.”

Dawn looked up, saw Spike slipping off his blanket, and rolled her eyes. “Your hair is smoking, you dork.”

“Yeah, well. Played it a bit close.” He hung the smoldering item up as if it were a coat and joined Buffy at the French doors to the living room. Dawn was spread out on couch and coffee table, pretending to do homework but clearly accomplishing very little—every book was open, every looseleaf page was neatly titled and utterly blank—and her body was positioned as if she had been watching the door. 

Mom, sitting at the far corner of the couch, had been relegated to one tiny segment of the furniture and seemed amused by something as she watched the other two members of the conversational team enter the room. “It’s a good thing Buffy’s talked you out of too much hair gel. It’s flammable, isn’t it? You might end up going up like Michael Jackson.”

Dawn giggled and bent over to look industrious. Buffy rolled her eyes and struck out for the nearest armchair.

Spike strode ahead of her and plopped himself down with a glare, opening his arms. “It bloody well is not. And it wouldn’t matter, because every bloody part of me is flammable. And any road, I need some people on  _ my _ side in this whole hair debate…”

“Nope,” Dawn interrupted, popping the ‘p’ hard. “I’m with Mom and Buffy. Unbreakable Summers front. Unanimous in committee, no abstentions. Curls are cute. More Spike curls. Curls r’Us.”

Sighing heavily, Spike glared up at Buffy. “See what you started, you?” And he put on a godawful falsetto. “‘Oh, just use the mousse that one time, because we don’t have any gel. It’ll be between us, this business with the curls. I’ll let you get back to bein’ you the minute we get it out of my system’…”

Buffy parked herself in his lap, almost ready to smile. He was trying so hard to joke around, to play the martyr to relieve the tension. And he was doing it for her, and for Mom. The least she could do was play along, let the moment push back against the black hole of terror trying to erode her very being from the heart outward. “To be fair, I didn’t actually say any of that except the first thing...”

Spike made a noise of utmost disbelief.

“...And also, didn’t you use mousse all through the seventies and eighties or whatever? Don’t lie; I saw that pic of you in all the Punk gear with your hair all poufy and messed up just-so. So let’s be real; the ‘you’ part is way debatable.” 

Her guy narrowed his eyes at her, trying for deadly. “You go spillin’ state secrets like that and you’ll never get another look into any of my photo albums, ever ag…”

“You have photo albums, Spike?” Mom asked, sounding fascinated. She had her chin in her hand, now, gaze riveted on his face.

Buffy rolled her eyes as she adjusted herself in his lap to find a comfy position. “He’s bragging. More like, random pictures stuffed into books and journals and crap. He said it was because they can’t see themselves in mirrors, so they had to…”

“Check the look with a camera. I get it!” Dawn glanced up again from her homework, eyes wide with sudden comprehension. “So, what? You just have, like, a bunch of polaroids or something? Because you know now we all need to see every single one of ‘em.”

“Traitor,” Spike informed the shell of Buffy’s ear, low and mock-threatening.

And then, as if the conversational momentum had abruptly failed them all, the room stuttered into silence. Buffy struggled, aware she should say something, but she had no clue what; how to open the conversation, or if it should even be her who should do so, or…

“So,” Dawn broke in again before anyone else could, “what’s the big?” Her eyes remained on her books, pencil poised in her hand, but she sounded tense. 

They adults stared, exchanged a few glances. Mom looked pale but poised. Buffy felt like panicking and running out the back door; as if Spike’s room-temperature grip on her waist was all that was keeping her anchored in place. His palms were gentle on her, but the rest of him was rigid, unmoving.

“C’mon, you guys. This is like some kind of summit meeting.” Dawn’s head lifted, her expression set and dispassionate but eyes glittering. “What’s the problem?”

/Oh God…/

“Well, first of all, your sister and Spike have some news they wanted to tell you…”

That shifted gears on everything. /Wait, what? Oh, God, you’re gonna do this to us  _ now _ , Mom?/

Underneath Buffy, Spike grunted as if he’d been punched in the stomach. A feeling that wasn’t quite dread and had some threads of maybe stunned amazement drifted between them, followed by amused admiration. 

Buffy remained simply stunned. “Uh…”

“What?” Dawn asked, thawing a little to turn to them with growing interest. “What’s the news?” She bounced then. “Are you pregnant?” 

Buffy choked on literally nothing.

“No, wait, that’s not possible. It isn’t, right? You can’t, can you? Get her pregnant?” Dawn’s voice rose higher and higher in combination excitement and horror, now complete with a narrow-eyed glare of accusation for a gaping Spike.

Buffy kind of wanted to bang her head against the wall. 

Spike loosed her waist to bury his face in one hand. “Oh, hell. Niblet, just bloody stop, please? No, I can’t, and no, she isn’t.”

“Oh.” Dawn sounded both relieved and a little deflated. “Well, I guess that’s good… though also kind of sad. You two would make the most adorable baby  _ ever _ …”

“Oh my God, Dawn, just shut up for a second. We got blood-married. Dracula reminded us we should do it, so we stopped putting it off. So now we’re mated in a sort of vampire way.”

“Blood…”

“It’s permanent. Spike’s your brother-in-law.” Buffy paused mid-explanation, while Dawn stared at them in shock. “Brother-in-blood?” she corrected questioningly, and glanced up at Spike’s jaw.

Spike rolled his eyes in prompt and thorough exasperation. “Buffy, there isn’t a term. You don’t have siblings in a nest. Or, I reckon you do in that if your sire has other childer they’re sort of your siblings, but if I’d mated you in a nest…” He halted, frowning, then flung his fingers wide, impatient. “There’s just no sodding terminology for a thing hasn’t been done, yeah? They’d never let you. Look at us! It’d bloody well cock up the hierarchy, cuttin’ loose the master’s minions like that to seal ‘em to a mate.”

Buffy nodded thoughtfully, accepting that explanation. It was, after all, one of the main reasons she’d wanted to do it; to take over his bond from Angel and Dru, though they hadn’t exactly thought through all of the provisos vis a vis that implied hierarchy stuff. /And why didn’t we? It’s blood. there’s always someone at the top of the food chain!/ 

God, Angel was going to be so pissed; just from a ‘messing with the natural order of things’ perspective. Keeping his underling in his charge was such a  _ thing _ to him, whether he stayed around to do it or not. “Well, anyway…” she blew it off, and turned back to her sister, who was staring at them as if they had just announced they were running off to join a cult.

“Are you  _ serious?” _ Dawn breathed, incredulous.

Was she upset about it? Glad? It was hard to tell. “Yeah,” Buffy answered quietly.

“Oh my  _ God!” _ Dawn shrieked, and no shit,  _ leaped _ over Mom’s legs (Mom leaned back out of the way to avoid being smacked in the face by wayward, coltish body parts), launched herself over the corner of the coffee table, and flung herself into their arms. “This is so  _ cool!” _

They spent the next couple of minutes under assault from long limbs and enthusiastic cheek-kisses and huge hugs and supersonic shrieking. Eventually the youngest Summers resolved herself back into salvageable form and started ‘Twenty Questions, Vampire Mating Edition’. “So, how did you do it?”

Buffy bit her lip and dug her nails into Spike’s thigh when he started to chuckle. /‘Do it’ being the operative term./ “Uh, that’s… complicated.” /And oh so private./

“Ooh! Was there a ceremony?”

Spike fielded that one. “Of sorts. A rather… short and primitive one.”

“Which I hope we can remedy later,” Mom broke in sternly. 

Buffy opened her mouth, closed it again, at a loss for what to say. 

Thank goodness this topic sent Dawn off on a rather predictable tangent. “Oh, yay! Like a commitment ceremony, or…” She bounced from where she had been squatting at Buffy and Spike’s feet like some sort of student basking in the glow of their love. “OH! Do you think we can do a double one, get Willow and Tara to also do one?”

/Oh, we so need to rein this in before it gets out of control./ Flinging up a hand, Buffy halted her sister’s insane excesses before she could explode or something. “Settle down there, turbo, before you plan everyone’s weddings for the next ten years…”

“I’m just saying. Everyone’s so happy—I mean, Xander and Anya are who knows what, but you two and those two are great, anyway—so why not celebrate the happy? Big parties with big flowers and big cakes and…”

Spike sighed and leaned forward to catch her hand and pull her close. “People gotta be ready first, Niblet. They can’t make a commitment like that just because it seems right to everyone outside of them. It’s gotta be right for  _ them _ . An’ even then, sometimes things happen later as can mess it up; no matter how right it was at the time. You gotta let people go at their own pace.”

Dawn drew back with a sigh, her bright, happy balloon all pinpricked. “Why do you have to be all ‘adult Spike’ right now and not ‘impulsive guy’?”

“Was impulsive guy when I threw myself at your sister’s feet and begged her to own me. Which is how I got myself into this mess in the first place.”

“Hey!” Buffy exclaimed, half-amused and half-horrified, and wapped him over the head with a copy of ‘Better Homes and Gardens’ from the nearby end table. 

He didn’t even try to block; just tightened his arms around her waist and eyed her with a steady, pointed gaze. “I’m gettin’ talked into a twilit promenade on the back bloody porch, with dancing and the whole lot, Buffy, you just watch. Mum’ll get me into a tie before the end; can see it now. ‘F I’d’ve known…”

Buffy narrowed her eyes dangerously. “You’d what?”

He grinned and rolled his tongue. “Stay right there on my metaphorical knees and beg to be yours, any road. I’d just have taken a bit more on credit over the last few months, yeah?”

Buffy rolled her eyes at him. As if he hadn’t had his chances to be on top, as it were.

She shivered a little, remembering a few moments in particular. Like the one with the handcuffs. That had been, um…

Guh.

_ Anyway _ .

“Ugh. Do you two ever not flirt?” Dawn demanded, flouncing back around the coffee table to return to her seat on the couch.

“There are times when they don’t,” Mom broke in quietly.

Buffy tore her eyes away from Spike as the realization struck. /Oh, crap. She’s gonna do it./

She felt Spike tensing all around her. “Yeah, we don’t when, ah, something important’s afoot,” he agreed softly, and tightened his arms around Buffy as if to shore up both her and himself. 

He was trembling. Or maybe she was.

Probably they both were.

“Dawnie.” Mom turned to face the youngest Summers scion. “There’s something else you need to know.”

“Oh?” Dawn’s voice was tense again. Clearly she sensed the incoming impact. 

“Yes. Last night when we were having dinner, Spike noticed a smell on me when we were saying goodnight. It was a smell he recognized. It turned out to be a very lucky thing. We went to the hospital…”

“Wait,” Dawn protested. “What?” Her eyes darted to Spike’s, back to Mom’s. “A… smell? And you went to… the hospital? Wh…”

“Just listen, baby. You see, apparently some illnesses have a distinct odor. I guess some dogs can smell them too, but they can’t talk to us about it.” Mom turned her head over her shoulder to favor Spike with a brief, if warm, smile. “Vampires, luckily, can. Which means the illness I have was detected extremely early, before it could get very dangerous, and it can be treated swiftly and aggressively. I have to wait a few days for the first procedure, and then from there, once we know more, we’ll know what to do next…”

Dawn was very pale now, shrinking back against the cushions of the couch. “Th… The first  _ procedure? _ What kind of…”

Mom caught her hand, held it between two of hers. “A biopsy, honey. They need to check and see if the… mass I have is malignant or benign. From there they can figure out if they need to remove it, or try to shrink it with medicine, or…”

Dawn turned white as a sheet. “No,” she moaned, voice shaking. “No…”

/Oh God…/

“It’s very early, baby. I should be fine…”

“No. Mom, no…” She ripped her hand out of Mom’s cradling two. “No! Are you saying you have  _ cancer?” _

The word struck Buffy harder than any blow she had ever taken in any battle. She thought she might throw up on the spot.

Spike’s arms tightened around her, holding her up while the world whirled.

“No,” Mom answered softly, apparently unperturbed. “I’m saying I have a possibly benign tumor in my brain. We don’t know yet if it’s cancerous…” 

/Except that if you smelled it, Spike, then…/ It was all very potato potahto, and just words, and not reassuring, and…

“Which is what the biopsy will tell us. I’m scheduled to have one in a week or so, depending on cancellations, and then from there we’ll know if they need to operate to remove it or what the plan is. Which is why I wanted the whole family here; so you’d have Buffy and Spike at your side while you process all this…”

Dawn’s eyes darted to theirs, terrified and heading toward raging. “You  _ knew!” _

Buffy found her voice somehow. “Just since last night. Mom asked us to wait to tell you till we could all be together…”

“You knew, and you didn’t tell me! You…”

“Dawn…”

“I can’t  _ believe _ you!” Leaping up, she ran from the room to thump up the stairs at speed. The slamming of her bedroom door resounded. 

Left behind downstairs, the remainders of the family looked to one another in resignation. 

“Why does she always blame me?” Buffy finally asked of no one in particular.

“Because, pet,” Spike answered softly, “you’re the closest. When we’re hurtin’ and we swing, the closest are the ones get caught in the crossfire.” Lifting her limp, chilly hand, he kissed the back of it, at the knuckles. “We always hurt the ones we love.”

Buffy closed her eyes, afraid of what that meant.

“Take it as a compliment?”

“Oh God.”

Mom sighed and came to her feet. “Part of me wants to go up there, tell her that was not fair of her and unacceptable, and that she should apologize to you…”

“No, Mom… it’s okay.” Buffy pushed herself to her own feet. “Last night I took it out on Spike. He’s right. It’s just… lashing out. If anyone should go up it’s me…”

Mom swiveled to them, looking concerned. “You… Are you two…”

“All’s well, Mum. Just a bit of friendly rough and tumble. I was just as needful of a scrap.”

“Oh. Right. I forget that you two…” She waved her hand aimlessly, distracted. “…Do that.” Shaking her head, she eyed the stair once more. “I’m not so sure you should go up just yet, Buffy. Whatever she’ll say right now would just cut deep…”

“She shouldn’t be alone.” /I need to be there for her./

Spike’s hand on her arm. “I can go up, love.”

/And I love you for saying it. But./ “I know. And she’ll need you at some point in this, just like I do. But I think this is an us thing right now.”

Spike nodded, stepped back, turned to Mom. “Cocoa and marshmallows?”

Mom’s lips twitched. “With a side of eavesdropping?”

Spike tilted his head slightly in that way that said he would oblige if she requested enlightenment. Buffy shook her head at the egregiousness of the overt conspiracy as she headed up.

***

_ Knock, knock. _ “Hey. Dawnie.”

“Go away!”

With a sigh, Buffy ignored her to push the door open. /Might as well get it over with, being the punching bag./ The irony was not lost on her that she had done this with Spike earlier; and that he had volunteered for it. Now she was doing the same for Dawn. /I guess we just do that for the people we love, sometimes. Because Summers girls are violent, or something…/

Dawn was laying facedown on her bed, body canted away from the door. “Don’t you understand English? I said go  _ away!” _

“I understood,” Buffy answered patiently, and fought not to cross her arms, to keep her body language somewhat open. “I’m just ignoring you for your own good.” /Low, even tones. Wide, open stance. Public Speaking class for the win./ 

“Great,” Dawn snapped. “Now I get the tough love.”

/Keep all the sighing inward./ “No. Just love.”

Protracted, stubborn silence. Time to try again.

What had Spike said to do? Try to open up, at least a little? “I get it, you know. How it feels. I was there, last night.” God, this was hard. It hurt. “This… got sprung on all of us. And I felt like the world was falling out from under my feet…”

“Great. That’s great. And you all thought, ‘We’ll just keep little Dawnie out of the loop. She’s too young and stupid to handle it…’”

Punched while she was keeping herself deliberately open, Buffy clung to her nonexistent patience with serious effort. Remaining vulnerable to attack was the greatest act of love she could fathom, and here was her sister, throwing it right in her face like this, and… And despite all her best efforts, she couldn’t quite keep the edge out of her voice when she answered. “Or, we thought, ‘Let’s all get our heads on straight so we can tell Dawn about this without bursting into tears, and talk about it like adults, together as a family, instead of freaking her out by calling her home early from Janice’s like there’s a four-alarm fire…’”

For the first time Dawn reacted, shooting upright on the bed and swinging on her. “But there  _ is!” _ she half-shrieked. “Mom’s gonna die, and you didn’t even bother to  _ tell _ me…”

Buffy’s stomach swooped, bottomed out. She clenched her hands into fists on her jeans. “Mom’s  _ not _ gonna die.” /We won’t  _ let _ her./

Buffy’s kneejerk denial of that shared fear only incensed Dawn the more. “Oh yeah? Sure! She has  _ cancer! _ And there’s a reason you all didn’t want to tell me! Because it’s bad, right? It’s bad, so you didn’t wanna tell me, and now she’s gonna leave, just like Dad, and then I’m gonna have to go move in with him, and leave all my friends, and leave school, and leave Tara and Willow and Spike and you and Xander and Anya and Jonathan and Mr. Giles and…”

/Oh my God./ “Dawn! Mom’s  _ not _ gonna die! Cancer isn’t an automatic death sentence! People live through it all the time! We caught this way early, thanks to Spike! The doctor’s super enthusiastic that that’s a good sign for Mom. Seriously. The only reason we didn’t tell you right away was because we wanted to get our heads together, and because Mom needed to get used to the idea for herself!” Goaded, the harsh words continued to fall from Buffy’s lips before she could forestall them. “I mean, step outside of Dawn’s world for a second and realize how this must be for  _ Mom _ , realizing she has a brain tumor! She needed to get real with it inside her own head before she told you about it! It’s not  _ about _ you!”

Dawn gaped at her. Buffy couldn’t seem to relent, the words pouring out like a dam had been broken. “You’re  _ fourteen _ , Dawnie,” she bit off, “and life is hard. Maybe it’s time you grew up and realized the world doesn’t revolve around you. Other people have lives and fears too, okay?”

Dawn whirled away again, tears springing from her eyes and mouth open in a soundless ‘O’ of misery, and oh shit, oh crap. /Way to be foot-in-mouth-Buffy and make things worse. Dammit./ “Look. I’m… sorry, Dawn.” / _ Breathe _ , dammit, and stop snapping. She’s just scared; possibly more scared than you are. She’s still, like, officially dependent on Mom. Duh./ It didn’t change the feelings; waspish and frustrated, that Dawn was being selfish. That Buffy had never gotten to be dependent, that she had had to move out and fend for herself at a few years older than Dawn, that…

It all made it tough to strangle down the childish, crying voice inside her own mind that said she still needed, would always need her mommy, that Dawn didn’t get the franchise on fear just because she still lived at home. But it was much-needed perspective. “It’s just… we need to suck it up and be there for Mom. If we need to cry or… I dunno; be mad? We can do it at each other; up here, or somewhere else, away from her. Yell at me if you need to; sure, fine. I can take it. Or at Spike. He gets it too. Or cry;  _ here _ .” Buffy fought it down, heard the trembling in her voice anyway, as her shaky resolve faded. After all, it had been less than twenty-four hours. It was all still so raw. The fear. The preemptive grief. “I… do it too.” /Shit. Pull it together, Summers./ Getting a handle on her voice somehow, Buffy went on with an effort at firmness, and uncrossed her arms with an effort. “But let Mom deal on her own, because this is happening to  _ her _ .” 

Her hands dangled uselessly at her sides, and just what the hell did people do with arms when they weren’t crossed? They were so  _ in the way! _

God, Buffy felt vulnerable.

Dawn sniffled for a moment, facing the far wall, but she must have heard the tremors in Buffy’s voice, because when she spoke, her voice was very, very small. “You promise she’s not gonna die?”

/Oh God./ 

Vulnerability fled. Drawing closer, Buffy sat on the side of the bed and laid a hand on her little sister’s back. She was so slight, if way too tall; and right now it made her seem fragile again. Small. “Mom’s strong, Dawnie.” Choking back a sob of her own, Buffy drew in a deep, fortifying breath. “And she’s got us, right?”

She wasn’t surprised when Dawn flung herself around to bury her long, lanky body in Buffy’s smaller shoulder, already heaving with sobs. She was surprised to find that, as she patted her sister’s shoulder and kissed her head, she had tears in her own eyes. 

Maybe in a way it was a kind of strength, to cry together?

***

‘Sweetie, can you get Dawn from school and meet me at the hospital?’

Buffy sat bolt upright in bed, the phone held to her ear and a groggy Spike hanging off of her waist. His hand, splayed under her tank top, tried to press her back down flat; he was half-asleep and had not recognized Mom’s voice. He always slept like the damned in the very late hours of the morning; which was fair, since that was his normal time to fall out. 

Buffy had been out cold as well… till this. She was wide awake now and squinting into what looked like maybe nine AM-ish light. “Get up!” she hissed, and kicked her vampire hard in the shins.

“Uuuff… What the hell, Buffy?” 

He turned over, incidentally yanking the sheet off of her and around himself, leaving her wearing only her underwear. “Yeah, Mom, we’ll get her and, um, meet you there. As soon as possible. What’s…” She fought down the rising tide of fear in her voice. “What’s up?”

‘Oh, they just got me an emergency slot for the biopsy. I guess my shadow’s… growing particularly fast.’ 

Her voice sounded so calm. “Wake  _ up, _ Spike,” Buffy hissed again, and kicked him harder.

“What?” he demanded, shooting upright.

She cupped a palm over the receiver. “It’s  _ Mom _ ,” she mouthed.

“Oh. Oh, Christ.” He raked a hand through his hair, making it riot with curls, and yanked aside the sheet to stumble out in a flurry of undone jeans and bare feet. “Yeah. Right. Uh…”

“How close is the car?”

He blinked, glancing toward her closed blinds, then at the half-open ones on Willow’s side of the room—Wil was gone, at Tara’s for the night—and frowned. “Too bloody far. You know how these idjits designed this place. Can’t park anywhere near anything useful…”

Buffy made a face. “Why did I give that stupid ring to Angel, again?”

He lifted his eyebrows at her in a very pointed, extremely expressive manner. Buffy bit her lip and turned back to the phone. “We’ll figure it out. See you soon.” /Mommy./

‘Okay, Buffy.’

“What… happened?” Spike ventured, hunting around for his t-shirt and avoiding her eye. Every line of his body was tense.

Buffy fought to remain calm in her delivery, at least. He would feel the shoots and tendrils of terror snaking through her. “I guess it’s growing fast. They’re going in to do an emergency biopsy, and then…”

His head jerked up. “It’s only been three bloody days!”

“I know.”

He shoved his arms into the sleeves of the tee, so hard it almost tore, then yanked it over his head. “I...” Jammed the hem into his jeans, found his belt, threaded and buckled it with sharp, angry movements, head down. “Bloody fuck.”

“Yeah.” In spite of her best efforts, Buffy could hear her voice shaking. “I guess maybe I should, um, go get the car and pull it up closer so you can run down, and…” She caught the blouse Spike tossed her, scooped up from the floor. “And then we need to go pull Dawn out of school, and…”

Their heads jerked up simultaneously when the door creaked and Willow stepped in, tousle-headed and bleary-eyed… and worried-looking. “Why do you need to pull Dawnie out of school?”

Before Buffy could even think of how to answer, Spike had straightened from another of his scooping moves, tossed her jeans into her lap, and was grabbing up his duster. “Joyce is having surgery,” he answered flatly, and marched over to the nearest seat to shove his bare feet directly into his boots.

Willow gaped at him soundlessly. “Wh… Wh…” She swung on Buffy, gabbling. “How…”

Sometimes Spike was so abrupt it was painful. “She, um, has a brain tumor. They’re doing a biopsy today.”

Fumbling behind her for her bed, Willow staggered back a little and took a seat. “Um, well, okay. Um. When did… I mean… Wow.”

“A few days ago. Spike smelled the… cancer smell on her breath and we rushed her in to get checked out.” /And this was so not how I was planning on telling my friends, Impulsive-Boy./

“Oh.” Nodding, her face working in that way that people’s did when they were trying not to show about ten emotions at once, Willow looked off to one side, down at her bedspread. “Is, um, she gonna be okay?” she asked softly, and plucked at the bright quilt. Her voice shook.

Wil was not close with her own mother. Both her parents, she had told Buffy, took refuge in academia and used it to hold their child at a distance. When she had first started coming by and Mom had hugged her all warmly and given her affection and a listening ear, Wil had eaten it up. 

She was a huge Joyce Summers fan, and Buffy thought she was pretty attached. Not that Buffy blamed her. She thought anyone who wasn’t a huge fan of her mother was just plain wrong. “We… We hope… the biopsy will tell us what…”

“They’ll either have to operate or give her chemotherapy,” Spike interrupted grimly, shoving his second foot in and lacing fast and hard. “I’d hate to council anyone toward brain surgery, considering my experiences, but the other sounds so bloody awful I might just threaten to drain the bloke says Joyce ought to do it.” And he was on his feet.  _ “Buffy.” _ Anxiety laced his tones.

“We’ll know more after today,” Buffy reassured Willow. “I was gonna wait to tell all of you till after we knew…”

“Get the car, pet!”

His urgency thrummed through her, keyed her own to fever pitch. Buffy bit her lip and turned for the door. “I’ll tell you more ASAP.” And she ran for it.

Fifteen minutes later he was diving through into the driver’s side door while she scooted over, every part of him smoking. He tossed aside a blanket from her bed—so much for that one—and put the car in gear to shimmy away from the curb with a protesting squeal. “Red’s worried,” he informed her grimly as he hunched over the steering wheel. 

“She loves Mom too.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t say anything else as he drove like a bat out of hell toward the middle school.

***

Ever since Buffy’s senior class had blown up the entire school to destroy a gigantic snake-demon, all of Sunnydale’s high school student population attended classes in Goleta, Montecito, Summerland, or in hastily-erected mobile-units set up around the middle school. Population pressures in all these areas were eased by the fact that a lot of families had bailed on Sunnydale after the whole Hellions crisis. 

Buffy was still amazed that the press and the police here had managed to cover up the whole exploding high school thing with that gas main story, when so many parents had seen the huge snake, and so many students had been turned into vampires. The number of grieving families, convinced they’d seen things out of shock… 

Still. There had to be a limit to trauma-induced insanity, even on a hellmouth, right? 

She so could not blame half of them for leaving when a whole other disaster happened less than a year later. 

Leaving Spike alone to stew in overwarm monster of a car, Buffy struck out for Mobile Unit Seven. Knocking on the door of the cramped structure, she popped her head in. 

Dawn looked up immediately, along with several other kids. And promptly turned to stone. 

Wincing, Buffy headed in to speak to Mr. Greenbaum, the history teacher. Because of the whole mobile unit thing, the teachers moved from one to the other instead of their trying to shuffle the students around in herds from one structure to the other. “Hey, Mr. Greenbaum. Could I steal Dawn? Family emergency.” 

She did her best to keep her voice low, knowing how it was at that age when the rumors flew. Every kid was probably listening in. This would be tough enough on Dawnie as it was. 

Mr. Greenbaum nodded. “Uh, you’ll have to stop in at the main desk and check her out…”

“Sure. Of course.” /Duh. I was in high school myself like, a minute ago. Which you know, since I was in your class./

“Okay.” He lifted his head. “Dawn, would you please go with your sister? The rest of you, keep reading.”

Buffy turned, following the wordless shuffles as her sister stood, shoving books and papers into her bag. They headed out silently and made for the makeshift office across the small lot. “Mom’s getting the biopsy today. We’re gonna meet her at the hospital and, uh…” Buffy crossed her arms as she walked, not quite hugging herself. “I guess maybe, get lunch while we wait?”

Dawn nodded, looking down and totally not speaking. She remained silent the entire time Buffy was checking her out with the attendance chick, and while they were heading back between the mobile units before she spoke up. “Is Spike gonna be there?”

Buffy nodded, relieved that she could give a positive answer. “He’s driving.”

“Oh. Okay.”

When they got to the car Dawn scrambled in without comment, tossing her backpack heavily down on the seat and scooting in on the beltless bench to sit with her arms behind each of them and her head hanging in the gap in between them. Whereupon she remained, silent and anxious, as Spike made to pull off. 

Buffy touched his leg and lifted her eyebrow to indicate that his ‘Niblet’ was not okay.

He put the car back into park and turned around, twisting awkwardly in the seat. “C’mere, Bit,” he murmured, and held out one arm.

Dawn fell into the embrace like Spike was gravity. 

They stayed like that for a long moment before Spike kissed her forehead and gave her a shove. “Sit back, Pidgeon. Got to drive.”

“Right,” Dawn answered a little thickly. “Can’t have you mowing down any more city signs…”

“Look,” Spike answered, leaning forward to put the car back into gear, “I only do that to announce the Big Bad is back. No point doing it when I’ve already been here for a time, innit?”

Buffy covered up her utterly inappropriately-timed smile by rubbing her nose with her forefinger. “Yeah, that would totally be gilding the lily…”

Spike shot her a quick, narrow-eyed glare. “How do you even know that bloody phrase?”

Buffy rolled her eyes at him. “I’m not illiterate, William,” she answered witheringly.

He winced. “No. ‘Course not,” he backpedaled as he headed out of the school lot. “It’s just not somethin’ that’s used a lot nowadays, and it’s not like you have a lot of bloody time to read extracurricular shite, with all the slaying an’ that…”

She knew he thought she was intelligent, but in some kind of feral way that didn’t have the fences of his book-learning. She also wondered sometimes if he despaired of the latter. “You help me build in the time,” she pointed out blandly. /What with the whole ‘practically at peace with five or six of the local demon species’ thing./

“Oh.” He sounded shamefaced. It was a start.

Time to grind it home. She wasn’t hurt, per se, so much as… stung. “You’re the one who got me to pick up the whole ‘reading in bed’ habit…”

“You’re kidding. You mean you two actually do something else in bed besides…”

“Dawn.” /Stay out of this./

Spike was, at this point, pained. “Can we just forget I said anything?” he muttered, swinging the car hard onto Fairhaven.

“Oh, probably not.”

Dawn had switched to seriously amused. “I don’t think you’re gonna get out of this one, Spike.”

“Bloody hell.” After a moment’s wordless driving he twisted the wheel around, pulled into the hospital parking lot, found a spot under some contiguous shade. “Here we are, then. Hand me the blanket, Bit?”

Dawn did, though she fingered the singed holes as she passed it over. “I think you maybe need a new one. This one’s kind of charred.”

“It’ll do for today.” His response was as clipped, as edgy as Buffy felt, and okay, so they should probably stop sniping at each other. /We’re not mad at each other; we’re mad at life./

They made their silent way in, two jogs and a dash, and waited in between the double set of sliding doors for Spike to stop smoldering before they entered the clean-oxygen environment. It garnered less attention. Eventually they ducked past the lobby and headed over to the bank of elevators, him folding the now very-holey blanket over his arm as they did so. The smell of char-broiled polyblend and slightly-burnt hair trailed them into the cubicle. “You’re lucky I don’t mind that stink. Or, I dunno. That it fades quick. Leather, cigarettes, whiskey, Spike-smell, all good. Burnt-blankie and charcoal-hair, not so much.”

Spike grunted. “Cost of doin’ business with the Slayer, runnin’ round all the bloody time at unnatural hours…”

Buffy lifted a brow at the bank of buttons rather than at him, where he stood behind her shoulder. /Vampire, still edgy, check./ “Doing  _ business?” _

He grunted in the obvious realization that he had stuck his foot in it there. “Bad choice of words, mebbe. But,” he defended, “we are rather in the nature of bein’ business partners, as well as the rest, which…”

Fighting to keep her lips from compressing into a thin line, Buffy flattened her voice. “Spike. Quit while you’re ahead.”

He shut his mouth. And the chaotic emotions rolled between them without pause; an endless eddy of fear-worry-anxiety-pain. And sometimes this whole double-bonding thing was more trouble than it was worth.

Silence fell… and was sliced wide by a very sudden fit of the giggles. “You two kill me, you know that? You squabble like you’ve been married for twenty years. It’s so dopey. Anyone who thinks it’s weird that you did the thing is insane. I mean, was anyone even surprised?”

_ Ding! _ The doors sprang open. Buffy exchanged a brief, weighted glance over her shoulder with her guy. “Uh…” she hedged, and stepped automatically out into the familiar smells and sounds of the floor where Mom had been being seen for the last few days. “Can we plead the fifth or something?”

Spike followed, uncharacteristically mum.

Dawn bounced out after them, staring. “Oh, wow. You haven’t told the gang yet, have you?” she demanded, sounding amazed. 

“No, we told them,” Buffy answered quietly, and crossed her arms. “And they were… surprised.”

Spike scoffed in his understated way that spoke volumes about his opinion on the matter.

“Okay? Were they all judgey, or…”

“Can we help you?”

“Can we talk about this later, Dawn? Hello. We’re here to see Joyce Summers,” Buffy answered, striding up to the nurse’s station.

***

Mom was already all gowned up and on a gurney and everything by the time they got back there, and Buffy was so not ready to face this. Which meant she wasn’t sure if it was good or bad that the hand-holding and squeezing and reassurances were very rushed. “I’ll be fine. You three just hang onto each other. I’ll be out before you know it, and then we’ll know what we’re dealing with.” 

Mom was being so brave, lying there looking all crazy vulnerable in her paper gown on the intimidating, fenced-in, rolling bed with all the fire-engine-red stuff and an IV in and some kind of electrode pasted onto her chest. She looked a little pale, but set and determined, and, just… “You’ve got this, Mom.” False bravado, but if anyone had it under control, Mom did.

“Mom… Please… be okay.”

Dawn, not so much with the okay.

“Oh, baby, I’ll be fine, honey.” A kiss for Dawn, and they were about to roll her away, while Buffy fought not to fling herself onto the gurney and beg for just another second. To cry for her mommy, and… /And I’m the strong one. I’m supposed to be… Mom needs me to be strong for her, so she can stay strong; for Dawn, and… And…/

“Joyce?” Spike’s hand, on Buffy’s shoulder, holding her to the floor before she could explode or float away.

“Yes, Spike?”

His low, rumbling voice, soothing, anchoring Buffy into the present moment so that she didn’t need to act. So that she could just be. “It’s both as terrifying as you think… and not nearly. You don’t feel a thing inside, because you can’t. Nothin’ in there to feel it. All you’ll feel after is the skin, the bone. Which is odd enough, but the business inside? You just trust they know what they’re doin’, yeah?” He had done this. He was fine. Mom would be fine. “You’re in good hands, here.” It was different. These were good doctors, not… Not creepy…

She would be okay.

Mom’s eyes softened, and she nodded, seeming to calm. “Thank you, William.”

He nodded back, a wave of relief flowing from him into Buffy. Relief that he could help. He needed that just as much as Buffy did, and… And she had him. She didn’t have to be strong on her own, and that was…

They wheeled Mom away. Buffy squeezed Spike’s shaking hand with her own, aware that if she didn’t speak up she would burst into tears or something; tears, this time, of relief. /I have  _ you. _ / “Thank you,” she whispered.

He lifted her hand to kiss it, wordless.

***

Then it was down to waiting. 

Spike alternated between pacing and sitting with an arm around each of his girls. Dawn did a lot of trying to crawl right into his lap. Buffy could tell he was dying for a cigarette, but he never left them; not once, unless you counted stalking off with Dawn at one point to go get them all Cokes. They came back with the drinks, and Dawn told Buffy in an aside that the Coke machine now had a dent in it because it had eaten Spike’s five, and he’d punched it kind of hard to make the drinks fall down. 

Normally Buffy would have taken him to task for even that level of impulsive violence in a public place, except… Heck. Considering today’s stress-level she might have slipped and done the same, and she had spent years throttling her abilities down to ‘human-normal’ in public settings. 

But right now… “Good job not picking it up and throwing it,” she told her guy softly.

His head had been hanging down between his shoulders, while he glared angrily at his unopened bottle. Now he turned to her, shot her a grateful look, then twisted the cap off. “Cheers, luv,” he murmured, and tossed back a good third of the Coke in one swig, as if it were rum or something.

Eventually Dawn curled up in one of the highly uncomfortable chairs, head on Spike’s arm and hand curled up under her chin, and fell into an exhausted sleep. She even managed to look like a small child again as she did so, which was a feat for a girl who was already an inch or two taller than Buffy and who would probably end up topping her by at least half a head if not more. “It’s been two and a half hours,” Buffy hissed, shifting in discomfort. “How long can it possibly take to do a biopsy? I mean, they did your thing in one and a half!” Her butt was numb as heck.

Spike shrugged and trailed his fingers absently up along her neck, under her hair. “Reckon they were less interested in takin’ care when it came to me, love. ‘Magine this business takes a bit of finesse. Got to go in and get a sort of core sample of the thing, but no other bit of her. Touchy business, findin’ the right spot an’ all. ‘S not like mine, where you could tell what was the wrong bit, all hard and knobbly and made of plastic, yeah? No doubt this all looks the same to the naked eye, an’ you don’t wanna get the wrong bit.”

Buffy shuddered at the very thought and moved to extricate herself. “I’ll be back. Bathroom.” 

Partly the trip was to take care of the necessary, but it was also to splash her face with cold water and fight off the willies Spike’s casual explanation had engendered before they made her vomit. A Slayer was made of stern stuff, sure, but it was one thing to whack off heads and be splattered with brains on the regular; entirely another to consider the damage that could be done to a living one—one belonging to someone you deeply loved—if you messed around in one in any unorthodox manner, or did something in there incorrectly. /Just one slip, and…/

Wincing, Buffy flinched away from the mirrors and tried to block out all thought. 

When she exited, Spike was waving urgently at her in a come-hither gesture, and Dawn was awake. “She’s out, Buffy!” her sister hissed.

Buffy broke into a jog.

***

“I’m fine, Buffy. I promise. You all can go home and get some rest.”

“But… the results…”

“Won’t be in till later today. Maybe not till tomorrow. And I don’t want you staying here overnight. Now, go on. You’ve spent enough time here with me. Go on. Dawn, I’m sure you have assignments to catch up on, and you need dinner; probably lunch too…”

“Mom, I so couldn’t eat…”

“Nonsense. Now, get my card out of my purse, and you all go get some pizza or something. You two, stay at the house with Dawn, please? And come see me tomorrow. They said I’ll be in here for at least another day, so there’s no reason for you to stand watch over me twenty-four-seven like some sort of armed guard…”

“Joyce, for bloody Christ’s sake, you’ve just had sodding brain surgery…”

“And I have a whole hospital’s worth of staff around me, hanging on my every beep and buzzer. And I will enjoy your visits, but I will feel terribly guilty if you’re all hovering in here every second. You’ve been in here for almost ten hours, hanging around like a bunch of nervous statues just waiting for me to wake up and make sense. Go. Get an actual meal. Relax. Come back in the morning. Please.”

“Mom…”

“Buffy,” Mom answered, drilling her with serious Mom-gaze, “I’m asking you to take care of your sister for me.”

/Okay, way to push my responsibility button. And that is so not fair./ “Alright,” Buffy subsided reluctantly, feeling resentful.

“Thank you, baby.”

“Mom, I don’t wanna go home and worry about you and… And I won’t be able to sleep, and…”

“Dawn. Go home with your sister and Spike.”

Dawn flounced up out of her chair and stomped to the door. “Fine!”

With a sigh, Spike caught Mom’s hand, being careful of the IV, laded it with a light knuckle-kiss. “Till tomorrow, then, Joyce.”

Mom patted his cheek as he lowered the hand back to the blankets. “Such a smoothie. Now get my girls out of here.”

“Yes, Mum.”

Turning with him, arms crossed, Buffy joined Dawn at the door. “Suck up,” she murmured in an aside as they headed down the long corridor toward the elevators.

“Know which side my bread is buttered on is all.”

Buffy shook her head wearily. “You play the odds. ‘Which Summers do I need to butter up today.’”

“Bloody good thing I’m excellent at placating Summers women…” He pushed the elevator call-button. “…And that every one of you is an easy victim to my devilish charm.” The door dinged open and they stepped into the right-hand car.

“You wish, buddy.” With a sigh, Buffy laid her head on his shoulder and hit the ‘L*’ button.

Giving in, Dawn caught his other hand. “No. He’s right. Big jerk.” And she laid her head on his other shoulder.

Spike slipped an arm around Buffy’s waist. “And people wonder why I’ve given up hot blood. Look at this I’ve got here.”

His voice, as he said it, throbbed with emotion.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
deep breaths before the even harder stuff.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for owing you all so many replies and such. You're all wonderful. RL is being a bear, and, well... Thank you for being wonderful.
> 
> (Oh. If you're reading my other series, I do a familiar thing in here, if a little differently. Kind of fell into it by accident, but mostly I think because I think it's just kind of up Buffy's exhibitionist alley, and Spike's way okay with playing that game for her. In this case, she's still getting to know that side of herself, which makes it more fun. It's more of a comfortable, well-known kink by post-Chosen continuity, but in here... whole other ball of wax. Anyway, hopefully it's different enough to show what I was trying to show, I guess, which is that they're in very different places--in the other series Spike's finding his way back to himself, and Buffy's well in command of her wants-likes-kinks without shame; here, Buffy's just learning them, and Spike's never had to feel bad about himself in any way.)

Spike dropped her off at the college the next morning, after they took Dawn to school. “I’ll go sit with Mum, pet, and pick you up after class so you can do the same. Meet you here right at three forty-five, yeah? Will have already gotten Niblet.”

It was so massively frustrating, that she had such a huge gap between classes. It was likely to drive her insane. But she would force herself to eat, and try to concentrate on her essay on the Romantic Poets that was due on Monday. Spike would look it over for her later, tell her it was hideous—though in the nicest possible terms—then half-write it for her because he wouldn’t be able to control himself, even though he would call it ‘proofreading’. And she would let him, because that would be  _ his _ stress-relief, not hers, and he really should be the person teaching this class, not Professor Stellingbaum. “I’ll show you the garbage essay I’ve churned out when you get here,” she told him, already ducking her head preparatory to opening the door.

He grabbed her chin, tension rolling off of him in waves, and tugged her back. “You’ll write something amazing about them, because they’re the best of the lot, and I bloody well believe in you,” he told her, and kissed her once, hard.

Pulling away, Buffy cast her eyes skyward in theatrical tolerance. “Not that you’re biased or anything. And anyway, I know you also like those newer ones. With all the weird imagery and intensity, like that one guy from South America with the weird name, and…”

“We’ll get there, pet. Now go lose yourself in it; in the words, yeah? Let it distract you instead of the other.”

/I wish it really worked that way for me, like it does for you./ But he was cute. 

Patting his hand on her cheek in gentle bid for release, she scooted out of the car, careful as she did so to keep the door-maneuvering to a minimum so that the light cast across the seat didn’t touch her guy. And headed for mid-campus, resolute of step while the DeSoto rumbled away behind her, leaving her bereft, their connection attenuated. “I can do this. I can do school. I can…”

Willow accosted her at the doorway to Building Seven. “How’s your mom, Buffy?” she asked, all ball-of-anxious.

“Oh. Um…” She so wasn’t ready for the interrogation-by-friends, but she also should really have known it was coming. “She’s, um, recovering okay from the biopsy. She’s in the hospital right now. She’ll probably be there at least till tonight, maybe tomorrow. Then we’ll wait to see if they, uh, can figure out from that what they need to do next…”

Wil nodded shakily. “Can, uh, we go see her?”

Buffy blinked. “We?”

“Yeah, you know, me and Tara and Xander and Anya and Giles… The gang.”

How Buffy had not realized that Wil would have vented her concerns to her girlfriend and to Xander was beyond her, now. A whole night had passed. The group would have had time to play telephone with the information posthaste. Heck, it was amazing they hadn’t already found out long before this, since Anya had had to be ready to spell Mom at the gallery at a moment’s notice. /Kudos to Anya for having more of a sense of discretion than I thought possible./

/Guess she  _ does _ know when to keep her mouth shut./ “I dunno if, um, it’s a very good idea for everyone to just barge in while… I mean, she’s in recovery, but it’s touchy, with the whole ‘drilled into her brain’ thing, and…”

“Well, yeah.” Wil did a very uncomfortable and put on ‘duh’ laugh. “I meant, you know, in small groups of sane sample-size. I know, we don’t wanna overwhelm someone who just had brain surgery. Even a small brain-surgery. It’s just, we’re all super-concerned, and we care, and…” Wil was babbling. She was freaked. “And, I mean, Anya’s gonna need instructions, right? For the gallery. And…”

“Anya’s already visited her, actually,” Buffy heard herself saying, and immediately felt like an asshole. 

Willow blinked to a halt. “Oh.”

“Just because they have a business together,” she hastened to reassure her friend. “Like you said. She needed to get instructions. And stuff.”

“Oh. Right.” Wil frowned, mildly placated, then, “And she didn’t tell Xander?”

Buffy tried a tiny shrug, feeling abruptly very tired as she turned a little to head for class. “It’s all just so… Everything’s all at once, and… She just… Spike smelled it on her, and then we took her, and they said it was a tumor, and then…” Buffy looked down at her feet. She was wearing her white, open-toed shoes with the two-inch heels and those really cute, wide criss-cross straps today. She had no recollection whatsoever of putting them on. They really didn’t go well with this skirt. It was coral. Was this after Labor Day? 

It was totally after Labor Day. Like,  _ way _ after Labor Day. /Not that I ever paid much attention to that rule, but…/

/Maybe it’s cause I’m wearing a white halter. Maybe that was what I was going for./ Not that the halter was strappy. It was kind of… crocheted-looking, actually, and thank goodness she’d had a nice, satiny camisole around. Spike liked that camisole. He hadn’t even torn it, every time, just sort of skinned her out of it. A lot. /Maybe I’ll wear it for him tonight. Just the camisole and the shoes. He won’t care if it’s after Labor Day either…/ 

“Buffy!”

“Huh?”

“You, uh, kind of checked out there for a second.” Willow sounded a little concerned.

So was Buffy, when she realized she was near the center of the building, eyeing the atrium with its thronging students, and that she was standing outside Lecture Hall Six with a flood of people swarming by, completely blanked out. /Woah, Summers. Dissociating again./

She hadn’t done that in so long. /Not since Spike and I… Or, well, not much, anyway./ “Sorry. I, uh…”

“Are you okay?” Wil touched her arm, tried to look into her eyes. 

“Yeah.” Buffy nodded, aware she sounded insincere, and fought to blink some reality and ‘thereness’ into her eyes. “Yeah. Much with the okay, Wil.”

“Buffy.”

/Damn friends who know how to read me./ “I’m just trying to keep it together. You know; for Dawn.”

Willow nodded understanding. “Well, you have us. We can be there. And you have Spike, right? It’s gonna be okay. Don’t… Don’t put it all on Buffy, okay?”

Buffy nodded, pulling harder on her bag strap like it was an anchor. The twist in the strap cut into her shoulder, grounding her in reality. “Yeah. I know. Sorry. I’ll… I’ll make time to talk to you all… soon. And you can come to see Mom in… like, ones and twos later. Not more though, okay? She needs rest.”

“Okay.” Wil smiled a little. “Better go in. I need to get to ‘Feminism and Yadda’.” 

Buffy smiled, aware it wasn’t touching her eyes. “Right. What is it this week?”

“‘…And the Crusade Against Gender Norms’. Which is actually really interesting. But next week it’s gonna be ‘and the Question of Whether We Can Impose Our Will On Other Cultures’… which just sounds like a painful debate waiting to happen.”

“Ouch. Remind me to be glad the essay I have to write is only about comparing a couple of dead poets to a couple of other dead poets.”

Wil smiled indulgently. “The Romantics and who, again?”

“The Neo-somebody or another, who don’t sound like they were in ‘The Matrix’ at all.”

“Because they were all about science, but not about technology.”

“Right?” Sometimes Wil said the most obtusely nerdy things. Once in a while she and Spike could get into some debates that were so incredibly opaque that it frightened her; especially when Giles or Jonathan or, god forbid, Anya, jumped in. 

“Never mind, I’m just being a dork. Have a good poetry class. And hang in there, Buffy.” And Willow impulsively gave her a hug that was swift, zephyr-like, slightly frankincense-tinted, and made Buffy feel extremely loved, before she vanished into the crowd.

Class was a haze of Coleridge and William Blake and something about the difference between an early tiger and a later, supernatural passage to historical figures made heroic, and admixtures of Greek legends, and the Greeks’ many concepts of love, and the impact of Greek and Roman lore on the English mind of the day, and something about pantheism and the movement of Spiritualism at the time, and then a whole sidebar about something called Deism versus natural philosophy and a return to ‘Arcadian’ joys. Then there was a detour into ‘Free Thinking’ and a lack of lip-service paid to the church and state; danger courted in a gentlemanly way. And Buffy could only think of how this was a period in which her Spike had begun his life as William, and how he seemed to talk about god without caring so much about the concept in any really concrete sense; and was that a demon thing, or a Romantic poet thing? Had he been one of these Free Thinkers who’d cared only about beauty and love, and hadn’t paid much heed to social constraints of a moral nature, only those which had been required of a ‘proper gentleman’? /Because if so… then once you shed your proper gentleman… all you would have cared about was life and love and beauty and good feels, and to hell with morals, because you never really believed in them anyway, did you? You probably thought they were a farce, or resented them just as much as the social convention thing, and… Wow./

It was a new realization, and kind of a shocking one, how much a person could have been the same pre-demon as they were afterward. Because what that meant was…

Well, it meant a lot of things that were continually tough for her to digest when it came to certain dichotomies she still took for granted that were probably kind of completely false, if not a huge, fat lie made to make things easier on her that were just majorly traumatic and probably… 

“Miss Summers, did you have anything to add?”

Buffy blinked and looked up from her doodles, found half the class and the professor staring at her. “Um, what?”

“I just never usually have a student so engaged in my lectures that they start talking with me while I’m doing them.” 

Hello withering. “Oh.” /Oh, crap, what did I say out loud?/ “I w…was just thinking… Sorry.” She hated this kind of stare-fest. “I was just wishing we could… talk to one of these Victorian guys, you know? It sounds like such a different… perspective than before. Or… than what we think of when we think of, you know. Back then. When you think of everyone just going to church and being good, la la la…” /Oh my God, though; if I  _ could _ get you to come here and guest-lecture, do you know the kind of education you could give them? Including the teacher? You’d probably upend so many of their ideas they hold sacred, telling ‘em what it was really like…/ She had a brief image of Spike, standing up front in the lecture hall, all snarky, telling the whole class that everything they knew about the Victorian poet was crap, and that they were all a bunch of disaffected jerks who mostly just wanted to get out of going to church, and probably wanted to have sex more than was allowed if they were going to be proper gentlemen, and... 

“Well, unfortunately they’re all dead and buried, so we must get to know them through their poetry. Now. If I may continue.” Turning away, the professor continued with the lecture. 

Buffy dropped her eyes back to her notebook, and bit her lip as she noted that she had written a very curlicued, very ornate doodle of Spike’s name, with ‘William’ intertwined throughout like a complicated embellishment. The jaggedness of ‘Spike’ and the wide swoops of the name exploded out of ‘William’ from all sides, while the lines of ‘William’ seemed, at first, very sedate and cooperative and very much contained within ‘Spike’… until you noticed how subtly the long ‘l’s and jagged ends of the ‘w’ and ‘m’ seemed to punch through, as if attempting to escape. 

/I’m trying to figure out how you work./

After class, Buffy picked at her tuna wrap in spinach-tortilla, forced down a few bites of her salad-a-la-ham-and-sunflower-seeds, and talked herself out of just eating Captain Crunch or something like a damn grownup, because it sounded much more palatable and she would actually finish that. /And the sugar will keep me going, and this won’t, and I have a Slayer metabolism, so why do I always have to be responsible and eat healthy, and…/

/To hell with it./ Getting up in a fit of frustration, she headed to the cereal bar, tossing aside her mostly-uneaten health food in petulant, still-officially-a-teen excess such as she had not been permitted to enjoy when she was in high school. Upon gaining the bar, she stubbornly poured herself a vastly unhealthy measure of Captain Crunch, with ‘berries’, thank you very damned much. With whole milk. And, she had some more Coke. Not diet. And she was going to be on a sugar high for hours while she tried to sit through her essay-writing extravaganza. So what. 

/I might convince Spike to take me out tonight and have a drink, too. How often did I do that when I was younger and most of my friends were out drinking? Try almost never! Because if I drink, someone dies, because I’m laying down on the job. Except Spike’s right, and jeez. Half the time there’s nothing to do on patrol anymore, and so what if tonight a bunch of idiots tries to end the world! My  _ mom _ is sick!/ She slammed down her bowl, slopping milk over her hands. /My mom has a  _ brain _ tumor!/ She threw herself down on the seat, shoved a spoonful of too-hard, almost slimy cereal into her mouth, crunched it stubbornly between her teeth. “They’re lucky I care most nights anyway!” she mumbled, and tried not to spit milk and bits of cereal at her nonexistent table companion. And promptly felt guilty for even thinking such heretical thoughts, much less speaking them aloud.

At the next table, three students stopped laughing briefly over their trays to eye her. One chick lifted her brows. The other, a blond, dreadlocked dude, snorted. “You tell ‘em, girl. Also, you should get some weed and chill. They don’t matter; and they won’t anymore once you smoke out.”

/Okay, I don’t think I’ll go  _ that _ far./ “Thanks. But I’ll probably settle for just getting drunk.” Buffy nodded genially at them till they turned back to their plates, then frowned into her cereal and shoved her spoon back in. And wondered just exactly how much business she would drive from Willy’s place if she went there to drink tonight.

***

The essay was crap. She knew it, and Spike… Well, Spike was going to have to be really gentle with her. But there were clearly extenuating circumstances. Mom. Sugar. Caffeine. Mom. 

Her second class of the day? Total bust. She hadn’t been able to sit still any more than she had been able to back when they’d first found out about this whole thing. But then, she was never able to concentrate in so-called ‘Math for Liberal Arts’ anyway. “Why do they call it that in the first place?” she demanded of her vampire as they headed into the now all-too-familiar elevator. “It’s Statistics. Everybody  _ knows _ it’s Statistics. We’re all still gonna be scared of it, no matter what you call it. Most of us aren’t gonna pass it till, like, the third time, when they send you to the remedial teacher of dumbass students who can’t survive math for dummies, even if you change the name. I mean, who do they think they’re kidding, anyway?”

“Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, pet,” Spike answered in distracted tones, “or maybe it just looks better on paper. Sorts who run a uni always do like to sound a bit flowery.” He started for the exit as the doors sprung open… and pulled up short, Buffy at his side, when they were confronted by the literal throng hovering around the nurse’s station.

“Miss Summers, Mr. Pratt, could you please tell your friends that your mother can’t have this many visitors?” Nurse Ocampo pled, looking harried. Her wide, lined Filipino face was tight with frustration.

“Oh.” Buffy blinked over at the mass of Scoobies. “Uh… When did you all show up?” They were all there. All of them. Like…  _ all _ .

Even  _ Jonathan _ was there. Like, how often had Jonathan even  _ met _ her mom? Twice? Three times? /Wow, Mom, you must really make an impression!/

“They’ve been hovering for almost an hour,” the nurse informed them grimly.

“We’ve been going in in twos,” Willow jumped in hurriedly. “Like you said.”

Buffy tightened her fists and counted backward from ten with an effort. “I kinda meant later like I wanted to warn Mom first and ask her if it was okay with her, if she was feeling up to it…” /And not twos right after the other! Twos like… two today and two maybe tomorrow, or.../

“Oh.” Willow retreated into herself a little, frowning. Which Buffy supposed was fair, if that wasn’t what actually she’d said, but…

/Didn’t I say that?/

“We just wanted to tell her we’re rooting for her,” Xander broke in, all peppy. “We haven’t been in for long. Just a quick hi.”

/Yes, and she just had  _ brain _ surgery, you guys, and this isn’t about you wanting to reassure yourselves that she’s okay./ Beside Buffy, Spike was vibrating on the edge of violence; like a volcano about to erupt. “Okay, well, she needs her rest now,” she managed with what she thought was a credible attempt at sanity. “Anyone who hasn’t seen her yet should probably wait till tomorrow…”

“We can all come back another time,” Tara put in quietly. “Like I said, I can definitely wait. You can too, right Jonathan?”

“Oh. Oh, yeah; sure.”   


“Buffy, I’d very much like to pay my respects…” Giles began, glasses dangling from his hand.

“Leave off, you complete berk,” Spike burst out. He was growling; almost snarling and way beyond done. “The woman’s just come out of having her head professionally caved in by a bunch of butchers with drills, and had a bit of her sodding brain removed, yeah? Come back tomorrow. She’ll not have gone far.”

Giles blanched. “Oh, yes. Quite right. Of course. I suppose she’ll have had quite enough excitement for one day. We should all be off. Xander, Willow, Anya… Come, Jonathan, Tara…”

Buffy watched her as Watcher gathered up his ducklings and turned to depart. He looked chastened. Anya was chattering on about how she didn’t need to see Joyce today anyway, since she’d already checked in last night to report on the money, and how she was perfectly capable of running the business in the owner’s absence for a day or two without guidance. Xander was reassuring her, looking a little wrong-footed for having stuck his own head in the door. Willow looked equally sheepish, and Jonathan, as per usual, looked like he was trying to hide behind the group. Tara, though, held back as the group moved to wait for the next elevator car. She seemed to be hesitating, and then, with a touch to Willow’s hand, she stepped aside, back toward Buffy and Spike. 

“Baby, what…”

“Just a sec, Wil.” Approaching, Tara reached out, touched both of their hands with each of hers, smiled at them with what Buffy had never realized before were really strikingly green eyes. “I…I just wanted to say… I’ve been here. I… My mother…” She looked briefly down, twitched her shoulders, and then that gaze was back, firm this time, as if she had found strength from somewhere that she didn’t usually project. “I know you two don’t know me very well, compared to Willow or Xander or Mr. Giles, but I… I just wanted you to know that… I get it. And that if you ever need anything, or need to talk; you or Dawnie…” She nodded, stepped away. “Anyway…” And she very abruptly went back to being ‘shy-Tara’. 

Well, wow. Who knew. “Hey. Tara?”

The gaze came back, steady again. The soft-spoken voice of reason. “Yeah, Buffy?” 

“Thank you.”

“Yeah. Thanks, pet.”

Green eyes flickered briefly over to Spike’s, and a faint smile touched her lips. “Sure. Always.” 

Buffy hadn’t realized till now, Tara always played everything so… so quietly, but she was really just an amazingly full-of-love person, wasn’t she? Like, did she give off even the remotest vibe of grr, at all? 

As the other woman stepped back to rejoin Willow and the group embarked their ride down to the lobby, Spike grunted. “That chit’s too bloody good for this world. I worry about her.”

Buffy sobered. “What do you mean?”

He shook his head and turned toward the hall and Mom’s room. “I mean, world like this can easily grind someone like her to dust. She’s too bloody sweet, that one.”

“I dunno,” Buffy answered thoughtfully. “I think maybe there’s more to her than meets the eye.” There was something under the surface of Tara; something that niggled. Quick flashes; a hidden strength. “Willow doesn’t date pushovers. Quiet people, but not pushovers. I mean, look at Oz. He barely ever managed to string two words together, but if you ever tried to get him to back down over anything, he stood his ground. He was a mountain in that Mohammed saying. He would never move; like, ever.”

Spike nodded. “Well, hangin’ about with our lot, Glinda’ll get tested one bloody way or the other. Sorry to say it.”

He was probably right. 

They knocked lightly on the wall next to the drawn curtain. 

“Who is it?” Dawn’s voice called; a tried-sounding, carrying whisper. 

“Just us,” Buffy whispered back, and peeped inside the recovery room. “She asleep?”

“Yeah.” Siting in the chair opposite the bed, Dawn looked frazzled and kind of teed off, though she relaxed when seeing her sister’s face. “Everyone coming in here to invade kind of wore her out.”

Sliding in past the curtain with Spike at her back, Buffy nodded and moved toward the nearest chair. “Yeah, we sent them packing. I don’t know what they were thinking.”

“They weren’t,” Spike answered sourly, if low-voiced, and gazed down at the still figure on the bed. “Selfish sods.”

Mom looked so small, curled up on her right side with all those wires and tubes coming off of her, and that shaved spot on the left side of her head where all the hair was gone. She would hate that, trying to arrange her hair over a bald spot. Buffy wanted to comb the tresses over for her so she’d feel less self-conscious about it, but she had forgotten to bring a brush. God, she felt ashamed about that, like a forgetful, selfish bitch. All caught up in worrying about her essay and pointless crap like that, when Mom had needed a brush. She was going to get snarls, and need detangler or something, and by the time they brushed her hair out it would pull on her scalp, and that would really hurt her scar or her stitches, and could they even use a spray-detangler on her right now, or would that damage her skin where it was healing? And…

“Buffy. Breathe.”

Damn him. “You know, that’s really annoying,” she hissed, snapping, of course, at the one closest.

“Bloody tough,” he snapped back, stung.

“I’m just saying; me letting you claim me back doesn’t mean you get to be in my head every second! I mean, have you ever heard of privacy?”

“Right, because it’s so bloody wrong of me to want to comfort my bird when she’s goin’ through it an’ her mum’s in hospital…”

“Okay, seriously?” Dawn broke in, sounding amazed. “Not here. I mean, wow. Wrong place wrong time, much?”

Buffy realized very suddenly that she and Spike were chest-to-chest; still whispering but glaring into one-another’s eyes like a couple of roosters about to start kicking. Biting her lip, she looked away, feeling like a child who’d been caught tussling over a toy. /Man./ “I…”

Spike was already backing away, hand in his hair and glancing toward the bed with embarrassment flowing off of him in waves. “Sorry, Platelet,” he apologized, in lieu of an apology to the sleeping woman.

“Like, jeez. And they say I’m the moody adolescent.” And Dawn looked back down at her US History textbook with a perturbed expression, like she was the chiding adult and they were the recalcitrant teens. Which, right now, was fair. 

Also, kind of lowering.

Flinging herself into the nearest chair, Buffy buried her face in her hands. “Ugh.”

Spike hesitated before taking the seat next to her and laying his nearer hand lightly to the center of her back. “Sorry about it, pet.”

Buffy shrugged without excavating her face, spoke into her palms. “That was stupid. My bad.”

“No. It takes two.”

She would not cry. But. “There’s just so much.”

“Yeah,” Spike answered softly. 

Good thing very quiet conversations were easy to carry on when one of the conversationalists could hear a mouse farting two doors down. Heck, Buffy was pretty sure even she could hear things most full-on-humans couldn’t, what with the honing of the senses and the specifically tuning in for vamps and stuff. “Do you think we could… I mean, after she wakes up and we make sure she’s okay for tonight… Do you think we could just sit? Watch TV? Work on my paper tomorrow or something?” It was, after all, a Friday night. She would have all weekend to get to said paper, right?

“Whatever you want, love. Anything you want.” And his voice lifted over her shoulder. “What do you think, Niblet? Chinese and bad TV and no more homework?”

The US History tome snapped shut with a dull  _ whumph _ . “I vote  _ The Cutting Edge _ .”

“Beg pardon?”

Buffy bit back a smile. How Spike had been with her for almost a year and managed to avoid seeing her favorite movie of all time was a mystery. /Well, maybe not a mystery, since we only rediscovered the wonders of television in the last, like month…/ There had been, after all, a hell of a lot of sex to get through first. And the crypt didn’t have a working VCR. But still. “It’s only the best skating movie ever  _ made _ .”

“Oh, bloody hell.”

“And also just like the best sappy romance ever about people who pretend they can’t stand each other but are secretly totally hot for each other. You’ll love it.” Grinning, Dawn shoved a pretzel into her mouth. “It’s so completely you and Buffy it’s not even funny. Except, you know, with blades on their feet instead of swords and crap.”

Spike grunted noncommittally. “Does anyone punch anyone else?”

Buffy shook her head tolerantly and grabbed his arm to snug herself against him. “Sort of. There’s a hockey puck involved. A lot of incidental violence. A whole lot of athletic competition to see who’s top dog, though the woman usually has the edge…”

Spike tilted his head to indicate he had bowed to superior force. “Doesn’t sound half bad. When do they shag?”

Dawn snorted way more loudly than anyone would ever give her credit for when looking at her stick-figure frame. “Don’t get your hopes up. Those two took longer than even you two.”

Spike made a face. “What kind of movie is this where there’s all that and no shagging?”

“You’ll see,” Buffy answered, and settled in to wait for Mom to wake up. “It’s worth it, I promise.”

***

“You’re lying. These two will be shaggin’ before we get a quarter-hour further into this bloody thing. Tops.”

“Uhuh. More popcorn?”

“If there’s tabasco. See, look there. She’s signaling like a bloody semaphore; and he’s all but tearing his sodding trousers off for her…”

“This is gonna be a long viewing experience.”

***

“What the bloody hell is  _ wrong _ with these two? I’d say she’s frigid, but… Oh, wait. Is the poor bird a virgin or summat?”

“You know, I was wondering that too. What do you think, Buffy?”

“I am so not going to get into this conversation…”

“Oh, because I’m so innocent…”

“I’m just going to say that when you see her boyfriend, and how he acts around her, I’m willing to bet that that trip to the hotel was supposed to be ‘that time’. And you know he’s the only guy who’s ever given her the time of day, because he works for daddy…”

“Money-grubbing bastard. Poor chit’s so desperate she’s practically vibratin’. Look at her. This Dorsey bloke needs to put her out of her misery. He talks a big game; what the bloody hell’s his great problem?”

“Maybe he’s trying to be a gentleman?”

“Has a gentleman, she does. She’s bored as hell. She wants to get shagged. It’s as plain as day.”

“I hate to say it, but I’m with Spike on this one.”

“Dawn, shut up and watch the movie.”

***

“Are you bloody well serious? They didn’t shag after that? She was all but throwing herself at him!”

“She was drunk. He was trying to do the right thing!”

“Oh, Christ.”

“So, if I’d thrown myself at you, all drunk, before we’d gotten together…”

He waggled his brows at her. “I’d’ve had you six ways to Sunday, pet, and you’d’ve woken up thoroughly debauched and with a ruddy awful hangover, convinced you were a disgusting person for having gone to bed with a demon, and terribly confused about why you’d had such a bloody good time.”

He probably wasn’t wrong. “Of course you would have. Because you have no conscience.”

“Not sayin’ it wouldn’t’ve ended badly, love, but it sure the bloody hell would’ve been the shag of a lifetime, yeah?” He pushed himself up on one elbow. “Haven’t had you smashed yet. When are we gonna try that?”

“Well, I’ve actually been th…”

“Lalala! Virgin ears, here!”

/Ooops./

***

“Well, that was a bloody waste. All that buildup and no shagging. What the hell?”

“Okay, but you know they’re gonna go back and do it till way past dawn, right? Even though they’ve both been up all night? And her dad can just deal…”

“Her dad sucks anyway.”

“...So they just left it up to our imaginations, is all.”

“Bloody hell. And that’s how you know it’s a bird-flick.”

“Um, because you didn’t know that from the figure-skating and the romance-novel setup, Mr. ‘I Religiously Watch  _ Dawson’s Creek _ When I Think Buffy Isn’t Paying Attention’?”

“Okay, but that’s no secret, since I’m totally the one who got him into that show,” Dawn jumped in. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter if they had sex or not, because it’s  _ so _ romantic. It’s Buffy’s favorite movie of all time; and it’s totally in my top ten.”

Spike stopped bitching to eye Buffy in surprise. “This is your favorite movie, pet?”

Buffy squirmed around to avoid his gaze, feeling a little mocked. “Okay, yeah. But I love figure skating—you know that—and I’ve… kind of been a… a singles skater my whole life, only with slaying, and it’s like… You don’t think you’ll ever get a partner, you know? That no matter who you try on, it’ll always be a bad fit. Or you think the one you had a long time ago was a good fit and then it goes really, really bad, and it burns you, and you think that was your only shot and no one else will ever fit, ever…” 

She shrugged, trying for nonchalant, though her throat had gone tight. “And then someone comes along who seems like an enemy; someone you fight with and fight with and you don’t get along and you think you hate each other, but you also can totally predict each other’s moves and body language, and there’s this… physical intimacy. And then you realize it’s more than chemistry; that you  _ get _ each other. That somewhere, out of nowhere, you have a  _ partner _ . That you don’t have to be a solo skater anymore. That you actually  _ can _ do the pairs thing, and that the reason you were solo for so long and that the others didn’t fit isn’t because there’s something wrong with you… It was because  _ they _ weren’t right, no matter how hard you tried to make ‘em fit. They were right for other people, is all. You had to find the right one for  _ you _ , even if it seems completely out of left field, who it is.” 

Looking down at her hands, she shrugged a little. “And once you do find that person… you know it’s right, and you’ll never be alone again. Because that person’s the one who brings out the fighter in you, the best in you, makes you better than you’ve ever been, keeps you working, keeps you alive.” She cut off, feeling stupid and weird and wrong… and was stunned when Spike twisted out from under her to bury her in the couch, mouth on hers.  _ “Oomph.” _

He kissed her for a long time, till oxygen started to be a problem. Buffy kind of forgot to care for most of it; just wrapped her arms around him and hung on, responding eagerly while he sort of drove her into the cushions in a fever of loving enthusiasm, hands roaming up from her hips to her ribs to cup her face.

“Oh my God, guys, get a room.”

Buffy was panting for breath when he finally lifted away, framing her face with his hands. “Love you so bloody much, Buffy.”

“I love you,” she answered, and hoped he saw the intensity in her eyes. Hoped her eloquent vampire understood all the things she never knew how to say. Hoped that he could feel them now, at least, so that emotions and the flow of sensation between them might begin to make up for all the words she couldn’t manage in the din.

“Oh, Christ,” he whispered, and lowered again to gather her up tight in his arms, to pull her up into his shoulder and rock her against him. “My One. Oh, love…”

“Well, fine. Movie night over. I’m going upstairs to my room where it’s safe. Ugh.” Seizing the bowl of popcorn, Dawn swung up out of her seat and clumped away toward the stairs, muttering to herself about adults acting like teenagers and why did the teenager in the house have to act like the adult.

“She’s got a point,” Buffy murmured into Spike’s neck. “I seriously considered dragging you out tonight to get tanked.” She couldn’t but shake her head at herself in retrospect. “Speaking of irresponsible.”

A low speed-chuckle vibrated against her neck-shoulder-region; Spike’s version of a titter. They were both so messed up. “If we had anyone else here to watch the Bit, I’d very much take you up on that, pet. Wasn’t lyin’ about wantin’ to see what you’d be like, havin’ you in your cups…”

Buffy felt a wild urge to call up Tara and ask her to stay with her sister for a while so she could go out and get plastered and screw her boyfriend upside-down in chains or something--or maybe to let him do her that way for a change--and not think about anything at all. Maybe ever again. And that was so not a Buffy thing to do. Not even a little bit. “I’m thinking bad thoughts. Bad, bad, wrong, anti-Buffy-ethical thoughts. Ones that would probably make Dawnie feel completely unloved, and would make me feel so guilty if Mom ever even  _ looked _ at me again…” The confession made it a little better though. 

“Gratifying to know you’d let yourself think them, at least. That’s progress.” His voice had gone very rough.

Buffy shifted beneath him, aware from his reaction that he could smell how aroused she was right now. “Probably best not to tell you too much about my thought processes, since you’re not known for your restraint. You’d probably definitely convince me that since it’s no criminal act to indulge my wild side…”

He shifted with her, ground down a little. “I think you’re too bloody responsible most days, Buffy, and if you don’t let off the charge sometime, you’ll fall to bits. And I’ll be right at your side no matter how you feel you need to manage things, but I’m losin’ my mind same as you, so…” He lifted his head, eyes blazing on hers. “I’m at your bloody service, either way.”

She was tempted. She was so beyond tempted. /Am I a bad, bad girl, or… What’s a few hours, really? Dawn’s going to bed, and normally we’d patrol a little, and this’ll mean I’ll be more together for her, and Mom, tomorrow, right? Both of us will be. And we’ll be back for her the rest of the night, right? And…” And this was insane. They should just go upstairs and… and be appropriate, adult role-models, right? Not…

Somehow, without thinking, her hand strayed to her pocket, and she was flipping open the phone she had gotten in the last year to replace her aging beeper. She held it out past Spike’s shoulder, aware his eyes were on her cheek, glittering in the low light as she scrolled through the names to a number she had only called a few times, looking for Willow. 

Once cued up, she stared at it for a moment, wondering if she could really do this. But… /She offered, right?/ 

Holding her breath, unable to believe she was actually taking this step, Buffy hit ‘send’. 

‘Hello?’

“Hey. Uh, Tara?”

Spike stopped breathing.

‘Oh. Hey, Buffy. What’s up?’

“Hey, listen. Uh, this is gonna maybe sound really weird, and if you’ve got something going on with Wil or whatever, I don’t wanna impose, but you said…”

‘I said anything I can do. And I meant it. What do you need?’

Buffy nodded, though Tara couldn’t see it, and forced the words out on a deep breath. “A…a few hours? Alone, without Dawn? To just… get our heads together? Is that… bad? But we don’t wanna leave her alone, you know? And she really, really likes you, so I thought…”

Spike lowered his head, very, very slowly, to the spot beside Buffy’s, still not breathing.

‘Absolutely, Buffy. I can come by for a while. Just give me a chance throw some stuff in a bag. I… is it okay if Wil comes too? We were just here doing some research into some magick-y stuff, you know…’

“Oh, we don’t have to… We didn’t mean to interrupt…” As far as Buffy had been able to determine from side-hints and conversation with Wil, when it came to those two, magicks often turned into sex, kind of the same way patrolling did for Buffy and Spike.

‘No, it’s all good. We can research the spell just as well there. It’s no big at all, right Wil?’

‘Oh, totally!’ Wil’s voice from the other side of the line was faint, but it still gave Buffy a qualm. 

/Are you gonna judge me if you…/

Spike’s resurgent breathing, hard and fast against her neck, tipped the scales. /Just for tonight, it doesn’t matter. We’ll even be… out, if something jumps off, so this is… virtuous, right?/ “Okay. See you soon.”

As soon as she flipped the phone closed Spike had it out of her hand and cast aside on the table. “What are we doin’ tonight, Slayer?” he ground out, fierce against her neck. His entire body was tense as he fought not to grind down into her. 

Hands free, Buffy clutched at him, dug her nails into the flesh behind his shoulder blades. “I say we go to Willy’s, or maybe somewhere more disreputable, get wasted, and then you tie me up and make me forget my name. And then if I have anything left I’ll use my muscles to make you forget yours.”

He growled like she’d punched him, and his hips snapped their tether, driving hard and low and urgent against her clit. His jeans were rough over the bulge of his cock, the thin material of her cotton eyelet skirt and panties doing little to alleviate the friction. “Bloody fuck, kitten.”

Breathing through her nose, Buffy threaded her hands in his hair. “Can you wait till we get out of here?” she managed.

He stilled with clear effort, his arousal sparking through her in a flood like lava to twine with her own urgency. “You ask a whole bloody lot, pet.”

“I know. But I need to go upstairs and tell Dawn… something.”

He made a despondent noise, but extricated himself and rose, disheveled and clearly ready to get the hell out of here. “Yeah. Right. You want me to come?”

Biting her lip against the not-so-witty comeback, Buffy shook her head. “Let me. You just focus on putting that thing away so you’re decent for our guests.”

“Fat bloody chance, waving fantasies like that in my face…”

Snorting to herself in mild amusement, Buffy left her strained vampire behind and headed upstairs. “Hey. Dawnie,” she called through the door.

“Yeah?”

“We need to do a quick patrol. Though, technically it’s a check of one graveyard…” /Restfield, which no one uses anymore even if they’re the world’s dumbest fledge-making-fledge or idiot demon con-man, because the town’s Master owns it and the Slayer practically lives there, but who’s counting?/ “…And a run through Willy’s. Not much; just enough to say I’m working, you know? Keep up appearances?” /All lies, and I should probably feel so bad about this, shouldn’t I? I’m finally letting my relationship with a soulless vampire corrupt my good sense or my morals or my… whatever./ And was it bad that she couldn’t quite bring herself to give a damn right now? “So Tara and Willow are coming by for a couple of hours, then we’ll be back…” She was only lying to Dawn, after all. She wasn’t lying to Wil and Tara. Omitting, maybe, but not lying. And it wasn’t like Dawn needed to know that her sister was leaving with the express intent to have her way with her vampire beau, or more likely to let said vampire have his way with her in any way he could possibly imagine. Because crisis or no crisis, and it didn’t matter if Dawn was fifty, she was so never getting a blow-by-blow of her sister’s dates with Spike.

“Oh.” Dawn came to the door, opened it. And spoke as if sensing she was being dumbed down. “Cool. Did you tell ‘em I’m fourteen and I can be alone babysitting other kids by now and I probably don’t need one sitter, much less two?”

/And I thought we were doing so well tonight./ “I just… didn’t want you to feel deserted.”

Dawn rolled her eyes, one hundred percent teen attitude. “I’m so totally fine! I mean, tsha! Like I can’t be alone for a couple of hours without adult supervision! What do you think, I’m gonna burn the house down?”

Buffy sighed, aware that Dawn had a point, since she had only called Tara half to assuage her own guilt. But still, the fact remained that… Well, current circumstances were special ones. “Normally I’d just tell you and go, but I didn’t want to leave you alone right now, with all this,” she repeated patiently. 

Dawn hesitated. The moment hung on a seesaw. Then, as if seeing how hard her sister was trying, she exhaled herself and nodded. “Fine. I like Tara. I’m kind of mad at Willow today, but maybe they’ll teach me a spell or something. Anyway, don’t worry, I’ll live till you get back.”

“Okay. They’ll be here in a few. I love you, Dawn.”

Dawn tried for nonchalant, but it had cracks as she answered, all blasé, “Yeah, I love you back.”

Heading back downstairs, Buffy was resolved to maintain adult boundaries with her guy at least until they were inside the car. Or maybe they could use the motorcycle tonight? Though, that would necessitate a quick trip to get it, which would kind of take them out of their way. /Maybe save the bike for another date./ Then she thought of the rumbling between her legs. They really hadn’t made much use of that machine, considering. And that was a damn shame, wasn’t it? /I s’pose I can suggest it. It really isn’t  _ that _ far out of our way./ “Hey,” she asked her guy as she descended the stairs. “Do you think it’d be too much work to stop on the way there and switch to the motorcycle?”

His head swiveled to follow her as she alit. His eyes trailed her hand on the newel post, up her arm, to her eyes. He looked… starving. “I think, my love, that that sounds a truly fitting idea.”

Buffy shivered. He only sounded like that when he was making  _ plans _ . “I thought I said I wanted you decent when our company arrives,” she reminded him, trying for playful, and eyed his crotch pointedly.

Said crotch jumped like a Cocker Spaniel whose mistress had snapped her fingers. Spike threw her a pained look. “You want it to behave, love, don’t keep drawin’ attention to it, yeah? It’s a trifle excited.”

Buffy giggled in spite of herself, wondering if she’d stepped out of her body… but no. That wasn’t it. She was very definitely in her body. With Spike, she always was. He just had that power; the one that made it possible for her to live in the moment, and forget everything else that beckoned, roared, demanded her attention, banged the door down. 

_ “He’s good for you,” _ Mom had said to her, more than once in the last year. 

/Mom won’t care, as long as we’re here for Dawn and her in the morning. That’s all that matters./

They remained locked like that, a good seven feet of space between them like minimum safe distance, until the knock sounded on the door. Then Buffy was off the foot of the stairs like a shot and opening it without even looking. “Hey.” Willow and Tara slipped in, carrying their bulging messenger bags and their occult reference books and looking wide-eyed and concerned. “Thanks for coming.”

“No problem. Is Dawn still up?” 

Buffy marveled at how much Tara was talking; and with so few stutters. It was kind of cool, actually; like some kind of ice had been broken. “I think so. I told her you two were coming.” Buffy tried a little half-smile. “Don’t be surprised if she tries to crash your spell-research party. She thinks your Wicca circle is the coolest thing since Spike.”

“Oi!” he called from his station behind the door, where he had moved with vampire-speed to thrust his arms into his duster.

“Let it go, Spike. It’s about time she got over the crushy feelings and got into some girl-power stuff. She’s too young to be thinking about date-y stuff, anyway.”

He grumbled, but acceded to her point. “Got that bloody well right.” Accoutered, he closed his coat a little tighter around his… area; his one concession in the interim to his little problem. “We off then, pet?”

“Yeah. Better get this show on the road.”

Willow assessed them both with interest. “Gonna go beat something up?” she asked cheerily, and set her heavy bag down on the coffee table. 

Buffy breathed through her nose. Told herself firmly that she had said she would lie to Dawn because kid, but that she shouldn’t be ashamed enough to lie to everyone else, because she was a grownup and had needs and this whole thing with Mom was stressful, and… “No, uh… We’re gonna go be a couple and get our frustrations out in a couple-y way so we’re not a mess tomorrow, and we can be there for Dawn and Mom,” she answered bluntly. /And you so don’t need to know about the alcohol and BDSM part. Though, probably we shouldn’t be thinking about BDSM when I’m planning on being way drunk, because that’s probably against the rules, but we have safewords, and Spike didn’t call me on that because… Oh. Right. Vampire. He’s barely sticking to this whole safewords thing as it is, to make me feel better about stuff. And this is probably a bad plan and I should probably not do it, but…/ 

Well. Maybe they could adjust the plan to ‘wasted and regular sex’ and then do the tying up part after some of the wasted wore off a little, or something. /Whatever. I’m making this up as I go./

“Oh. Um, I guess that makes sense,” Wil answered, sounding kind of floored.

“It does,” Buffy answered firmly. “I think…”

She trailed off when Spike crowded up close to her at the door and lifted his fingers to drag them, very pointedly, over his bite-scar. Buffy’s mouth dropped open involuntarily, and her eyes closed as her breath shuddered out of her in a rush. 

She kind of forgot to inhale again for a moment as her body rocked toward his. 

“We’re gonna go now,” Spike informed them quietly, and turned Buffy, gave her a little shove toward the door. “Put on your jacket, kitten.”

God, it did things to her brain when he called her that. It was a term specifically reserved for when they were… When he was the one who was…

He didn’t use it a lot, but when he did, it was… a thing. Buffy found herself fumbling blindly to shove her arms into the sleeves of the article he held for her. Looked once over her shoulder, half-unseeing. Willow was just staring at them, clearly thrown. Tara, though, was watching them, Buffy noted distantly, with what looked like a knowing expression. She was hiding her face behind a curtain of hair as she set down her pile of books, but from what Buffy could see, she had a faint smile curving her lips. 

“Have fun,” the blonde witch called as they exited. She sounded amused.

The door slammed quietly shut behind them, leaving them outside in the cool night. 

The air out there did little to bank the ardor in her flesh. 

From inside, Buffy could hear Willow’s voice, rising in shocked exclamation through the cracked front window. “What, so they’re just gonna go… screw somewhere, because…”

“No. They’re gonna go reconnect, and help each other forget for a little while, that life and death are all around them, by making each other feel alive. We know all about that, Willow. We do it with the magicks, and we do it with each other.”

“Oh. Well, yeah, but… But…”

“Here. Let’s start up with the spell again. We were reading Quintessus...”

Buffy shivered, staring up at the moon, sure she was messing up. That was, until the instant Spike’s fingers drifted, cool under her hair, to press at her nape and to slide over to just shy of his bite. “Come on then. Got to go fetch that motorbike.”

“Oh, yeah.” /That./

***

Buffy pressed her thighs together under the table. She felt like the booth was vibrating under her, the scarred vinyl like a sex toy. Everything vibrated. She was going to fall apart, had to stop herself from sliding around on the seat like some kind of nympho. Riding the Harley with Spike was one thing; a quick way to get a little turned on any day of the week. 

Riding it when she was  _ already _ all turned on was an entirely other proposition, and why were they here at Willy’s watching demons get drunk when she could be somewhere in an alley, bouncing on his cock? Seriously, who’s idea was this, anyway?

“Forbearance makes the prize all the sweeter in the end, kitten,” Spike informed her, taking a swig of his Jack-straight-from-the-bottle, and nodded at the single shot in her hand. “Drink up, and maybe I’ll give you a little something to tide you over.”

God, what would he do to reward her if she complied? “It’s just so gross. And it burns.”

“Just give it a try. I promise, it’ll go down smoother than the first one.”

With a sigh, she lifted the tiny glass, eyed it askance. 

“And don’t bloody sip it, or it’ll make your whole soddin’ tongue numb. It’s meant to be quaffed, pet. Just down it fast. Let it ride right past the front of your mouth, hit the back of your throat. Like givin’ it a blowie, yeah?”

“Now I see why it’s all, ‘you drink like a professional’ or ‘like an amateur’…” Buffy muttered, and holding her breath, she screwed up her courage, threw the miniscule glass at her mouth, and tossed the stuff toward the rear of her tongue like it was cough medicine.

It most definitely wasn’t cough medicine. It still burned. And it made it hard to breathe, with all the fumes. And maybe burned off all her nose hairs. And sizzled all the way down, leaving her wheezing. “Bleargh!” she exclaimed, shaking her tongue out and gasping. 

“Good girl,” Spike told her proudly, and gave her that look; that one that said he fucking adored her. 

She jumped when she felt something blunt and cool flick her vibrating clit through her panties. “Wh…”

“Shh…” He did it again, sending a jolt of sensation through her entire body like she was a plucked string wound too tight, and oh my god, was that his  _ toe? _

“How the hell did you get your boot off without me seeing you?” she hissed, half-horrified and half intrigued.

“You want me to stop?” he asked, for all the world as if he were making casual conversation. 

He sat there, leaned back in his side of the booth, lazy and chill with one hand wrapped around his bottle, innocent as any vampire could ever look, one booted foot planted on the floor and the other up to absolutely no good all wormed under her skirt, and… And… And she so didn’t want him to stop, but this was weird, and in public, and…

“All you’re gonna get right now, pet. Take it or leave it.” And he flicked again.

And then halted utterly.

Confused, she lifted her eyes to his, uncertain whether she wanted him to keep going or not. It was… really kind of embarrassing that what he was doing was working—or maybe it was how he was doing it, or where they were—but also her body kind of had a ‘beggers can’t be choosers’ mode going at the moment, and she had the distressing feeling that at any moment she might start pleading if he didn’t do it again. Which was really just unacceptable, but…

Tugging the shot-glass toward himself, Spike tilted the bottle to refill it halfway, then shoved it back in her direction and gave her a pointed jerk of his chin. “Drink up, kitten.”

She gaped at him, stunned. “You’re kidding.”

“Give a little, get a little, my love.”

“Oh my God.”

He grinned—evilly—and tilted his head back, adam’s apple prominent, to swig freely from his bottle. And lowered it to pin her with his predator’s gaze. “What’s it to be, then, pet?”

Her body blazed with need, thrumming on the edge. She could feel the cool aura of his, um… nether digits resting just there, next to her thigh. She was pulsing just beyond his reach, and… “Damn you.” Reaching out, she dragged the shot-glass close, picked it up, slugged it back, blinking. 

It burned, but not as badly the second time.

And shuddered when his toes went back to work with fierce skill; more than one this time, caressing over her damp underwear.

At sea, Buffy clutched the edge of the table to stay upright and bit her lips to keep from moaning. The room swayed a little as she rode a tide of impossible, ridiculous sensation. 

“Christ, you’re a lightweight, my love.”

She had only had three shots, but… “Please,” she heard herself whisper, and it was like the words were coming from someone else’s mouth. “Don’t stop.”

“That’s my girl.” 

Not only did he not stop, he went faster. And faster still, and it was insane, no one should be able to be this dexterous with their toes, or maybe she was just that drunk; but the bar whirled, and she swiftly forgot how it smelled in here, and the sounds around them faded, the world telescoping to the table to which she clung and the sensation of him… doing that, until she was convulsing, holding on for dear life so she didn’t fall, or bang her head on the hard surface, or… 

Well, at the end it was mostly so that she didn’t just slither right underneath the booth to land next to his bare foot on the nasty floor. 

“Well,” Spike drawled, and lifted his bottle for a satisfied-sounding swig, “I’d call that a nice start to the evening.”

“You,” Buffy breathed, still blind, “are a smug bastard.”

“You,” he answered, and sniffed the air around them, “smell like the only heaven I’ll ever see or want to know.”

He made her melt. “Can we…”

“Yeah,” he answered, and she heard the bottle being set aside, felt his foot slide away from her heated flesh, heard the thump as he reset it inside his boot. “Let’s get out of here, kitten, and see to you.”

Shivering, Buffy let herself be handed out of the booth and through the door, while a large compliment of the town’s demon populace watched their Slayer be escorted by the Master vamp who had once served her as, in the parlance of vampires, little more than a glorified minion. And left thinking about the politics of that little scene till tomorrow. 

Tonight was not about politics, or about anything else but  _ feeling _ .

* * *   
  
  
  
  
  
Alrighty then.   
You'll likely assume that the next bit shall be equally--if not more--smutty. Heh.   
I hope I shall not disappoint. 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When did another week happen? Man... I'm so behind...
> 
> So... we begin with what feels like me being cruel and doing a drive-by again, but I'm not that mean, I promise.
> 
> Also, I swear, I'll answer y'all. I mean it.
> 
> Oh, warning for some anal play in the italicized section. If that's not your choice of smut I'd skip ahead once the scene in italics starts to wend in that general direction... though there's a plot-driven reason for including said festivities.

Buffy turned over in bed, Spike sprawled along her side with an arm flung over her body. Her eyes popped open on the confused remains of an exceedingly sexy dream, most of it a retread of last night. “Did I really…  _ do _ that?”

A low rumble of laughter met her ears. “Can’t take it back now, love.” The arm slid off of her back to vanish beyond her head, to the accompaniment of a low groan and a few cracking noises as her guy stretched full-bodied; the kind of stretch he tended to do when he was utterly self-satisfied. “Must say, you surprised me a bit.”

Buffy blushed a little. “I… was really okay with letting you use your imagination. As long as I didn’t have to think.”

Spike was grinning. She could hear it in his voice. “So I noticed.” He rolled toward her, and his tongue trailed up her back, from the top of her panties, there at the dip of her tailbone, all the way up to the hem of her spaghetti camisole, which he pushed up one-handed to continue his trek along her spine. “Pretty much the only thing you said all night was, ‘I trust you’. Which is a dangerous bloody thing to say to a vampire with a hundred years of fantasies built up about what he might do with a captive Slayer in his grasp.”

“Uhuh, Mr. Big Talker,” Buffy murmured, squirming. “If that was what you were doing, you were oddly patient and gentle.” He had been. There had been no degradation, not even a pretense at abuse; not in play, not in props. There had been a few firm rules, her total surrender… and then an intensity of loving while she had been held helpless that had left her trembling, gasping… and his. 

His mouth stilled against her back. “Why’d you let me do it, Buffy?” he asked. “Let me bind you, do what I wished? I could’ve done anything.”

“I know.” She turned her face toward his, shrugged a little. “And I know usually it’s me doing it to you. But I needed it last night. And I trust you.”

He closed his eyes, let out a shaky breath. “Couldn’t but be patient and gentle, knowin’ that. You understand what I’m sayin’, love? That you’d… That you’d put yourself into my hands that way is…” He let out a breath. “An’ you know what it is to me to have… room for tenderness. To be able to put it in that place, where before it’s only been…”

She swallowed, remembering what he’d said, more than once, about Drusilla. What she assumed love had been like, for them… because it was the only way his ex had understood love. For them it had always come coupled with pain, with suffering, with cruelty. So maybe what she had given him by letting him be soft with her when they were…

Still, he had done it all, which was maybe hardly fair, considering he was also suffering right now. “Thank you,” she told him softly. “For taking that on, when I know you probably needed…”

His eyes glowed, and he stopped her mouth with one finger. “Oh, you gave me back so much, love. No worries. I promise you, I’m bloody well paid out…” And he lowered his lips to her shoulder. “Go on then. Go back to dreamin’ and rememberin’. I’ll lie here and dream and remember it with you till it’s time to be up and about. It’s still really soddin’ early.”

“Is it?” She had no sense of time right now. Her eyes were sandy, but…

“Only about seven.”

Seven on a Saturday. Why was she even awake? “Mmmm.” Closing her eyes, she slipped back into a happy somnolence, let the cozy memories play over her body and her mind, while Spike’s fingers toyed with her hair. 

_ The ride back on the motorcycle had her a thrumming mess. Getting off the way she had at the bar had barely taken the edge off, only whetted her appetite, and as they rode she had to fight to keep her caresses to his chest under the duster. As the gates of Restfield hove into sight she lost all remaining threads of self-control and dipped lower, over the six-pack of his belly, over his belt-buckle, to run a hard stroke up the unsatisfied bulge in his jeans.  _

_ One hand left the handlebars of the motorcycle to clench hard over hers, pressing it into place, and he huffed out a breath. “Not yet, pet. You didn’t ask permission.” _

_ She pouted. “But I wanna touch you. Get my mouth on you…” _

_ “Not for a while, kitten.” Turning into the gate on a long, slow curve, he rode along the maintenance path behind the crypts, seeking the shed that housed the lawnmowers and all that. The source of his illegal water hookups. Next to that was the security hutch from which he pirated his electricity. /My low-grade, petty criminal./ Beyond that was the little overhang between two crypts, vastly overgrown with ivy, where he stored the motorcycle for free. “Alright, love; off you go.” _

_ She stepped off, feeling jittery as he turned off the heavy machine and shoved it into its hidey-hole. And then he was back out, dusting off his hair and coat, and turning to grab her hand. “C’mon, then.” And he was tugging her down the back path toward the mausoleum he called home. _

_ She followed without comment. God, she never felt this submissive; like  _ ever _ , it was bizarre, but tonight it felt weirdly good to let him call the shots. To not have to think, to control anything. “I’m gonna feel so weird about this tomorrow,” she informed him casually as they rounded the side of the crypt to find the door.  _

_ “No doubt,” he agreed, and held the door for her. “S’pose that means I best do everything I can think of while I have the chance, in case I might never get another, yeah?” _

_ She turned to regard him as he followed her in and closed the door, assessing. Was he trying to give her an out? Scare her into changing her mind? “I trust you,” she told him softly, and tugged off her thin, leather jacket. Somewhere in between Willy’s and Restfield, the world had gone from whirling to just spinning slightly. She still felt floaty and mildly detached, but not nearly as ready to fly off the globe while it kept turning without her. “And I’m even mostly of sound mind. I think I’m about half as drunk as I was twenty minutes ago.” _

_ “Yeah?” Spike answered, cocking his head with interest. “I wonder if that’s drunk enough to be sloppy and abandoned, but still sober enough to mean what you say?” _

_ Buffy sighed and threw her jacket over toward the ratty couch. “Meh. I agreed to this before I started drinking.” Lifting her arms, she smiled at him. “Take me below and ravish me, vampire. Chains optional but encouraged.”  _

_ Spike held very, very still for one seriously protracted moment, and then something seemed to run through him that looked like exultation, and he leapt for her, in full game face. “Oh, shit, Buffy, oh, Christ, I’m gonna make it so bloody good for you love…” He had her up in his arms and was jumping down into the hole to the lower level before she had even gotten her bearings. And then he was setting her on her feet with a kiss that could only be described as reverent. “Close your eyes and wait here, pet. Let me set some things up.” _

_ “Alright.” She simply stood there, eyes closed, waiting. And was surprised when he didn’t move off right away. He just stayed there in front of her for a sec, breathing hard, his arousal pounding through her in waves to match her own, banked needs. “What? What do you want me to do?” _

_ “Nothing. Christ.” He sounded strained. “What you do to me, Buffy. I could go off like a bloody fountain just lookin’ at you, standin’ there, puttin’ yourself into my hands like this…” _

_ “I trust you,” she repeated, and felt the tremor of it blast through him.  _

_ “Bloody fuck,” he whispered, and brushed her cheek with his hand. Then, “I’ll be quick.” _

_ She heard the rustling, the sounds of candles being lit, the clink of the chains, and then, “I’m gonna undress you, kitten, and lead you where I want you to be. Keep your eyes closed, yeah, till I tell you to open them.” _

_ “Okay.” She was trembling a little now, not sure quite what she had gotten herself into, but really kind of curious to see where it would lead. He might never know what it meant that she trusted him with binding her, after her little trip to the hospital. After Lothos. But in a way, this would be therapy. /I can test myself./ The thought, if a little scary, was strangely alluring. /I’m tired of being afraid of this. And I know you’d never.../ He would never make her feel the helpless vulnerability she’d felt there, or in the Council’s hands. She had the power here; to stop it, to break free. And besides... _

_ She really did trust him.  _

_ His fingers brushed over her, a reminder that he was here, close; a safe and known quantity as he made quick work of her blouse buttons. And then, “Lift your arms.” _

_ She did, without question, and he muttered an oath as he stripped off her top and camisole. A faint note of amusement entered his voice, then. “No bra, is it?” _

_ Buffy found herself surprised at how steady her voice sounded; how certain and lightly teasing. “I thought you said underwear gets in the way.” _

_ There was a short pause. “You’ll note,” he answered, in a very controlled voice, “as how I’m not crowdin’ up to bury my face between your heavenly tits right now. I’m playin’ a bloody role. One I used to be good at, dammit.” _

_ Taken by surprise, she giggled. Pulled it in with an effort, forced her face to sober, imagining his expression. “Sorry. I’m respectful of your struggle.” _

_ “Cruel wench. Alright then.” He pulled in a few audible breaths, schooling himself to stillness, then moved close again, setting all her hairs on end and making her body ripple. And ran the tips of his fingers down, from the valley between her breasts, over her taut stomach, down to the waistband of her skirt. Down, down, to the hem, there at her calf. Lifted it, urging her leg up as well. She complied, and let out a little sob of breath when he slipped up under the skirt without further ado to hitch one end of her panties off her hip and down over her knee, off over her white shoes.  _

_ “You’re not supposed to wear white after Labor Day,” she informed him, scatterbrained. “Should I take those off?” _

_ “No,” he answered very roughly. “You’re going to keep those on the whole bloody time.” _

_ “Oh.” _

_ He had her underwear bunched in one hand; she could tell by the way he sat tense before her, the way he lowered her leg with a skim of knuckles, the way he used his other hand to repeat the process with the other side of her undies. /And, those are going into his pocket as a keepsake, and it’s a wonder I have any underwear left, with him around./ She opened her mouth to tell him if he was going to keep stealing and tearing her underwear, he needed to get on buying her more, but then thought the better of it. She was just letting go tonight. /I’ll tell him tomorrow./ “Am I keeping the skirt on too?” _

_ “Hush,” he told her in distracted tones, and drew her, eyes still closed, around the room in a four-footed dance. They maneuvered around the foot of the bed, toward the far side of the chamber, then, “You need anything, pet, before I bind you? Need to use the loo or anything?” _

_ She fought down the brief surge of panic. /I’m with you. You asked. That means I’m safe./  _

_ “Buffy?” he queried, hesitant and catching the edges of her moment’s alarm.  _

_ “I’m okay,” she answered, moved briefly closer. Drew in a long inhalation of his scent. /I’m okay. I’m with Spike. This is going to be good. Completely new and different feels. So just focus on the now, and the question./  _

_ Centered back in her body, she duly considered the matter; but she’d done that before she’d left Willy’s. The bar-owner had started making the bathrooms a lot more presentable, on pain of Slayer wrath, once she’d started coming around making irritable faces at him in the last few months. “No, I think I’m good.”  _

_ Spike remained still for a moment, then, “Do I need to know something, love?” _

_ She didn’t want to talk about it right now. Didn’t want to break the mood, didn’t want to bring it up. Didn’t want to think. “Can I wait to tell you if it comes up again? I want to enjoy this.” _

_ A brief silence, then… “Alright,” he told her quietly, and drew up one of her hands. Kissed her wrist. “Only gonna ask one more time, Buffy. You sure about this?” _

_ Buffy opened her eyes, set her gaze firmly on his. “I trust you.” _

_ He was in game face and blazing, and he looked… /Oh./ This was all demon, making love to her. No leftovers of the man. All demon, all the time. /And that’s why you want me to be sure./  _

_ She lifted her hand to his cheek, brushed her thumb over his changed brow. “Make me feel, Spike. Keep me in my body and let me feel you, everywhere.” And she very deliberately closed her eyes again. _

_ The hungry-satisfied rumble he made vibrated just under her skin in a way that would have been a predatory warning to anyone else. /But I’m just tuned into a different station with him; or I’m just that messed up, because Slayer./ Every hair on her body stood up… but for her, instead of signaling ‘Danger! Get out! Run!’ or even ‘Fight!’ all she was getting out of this was,  _ ‘God _ , yes’, and similar syllables that made even less sense and translated to mostly goo, because tonight Buffy had somehow lost all of ‘Slayer’ except the ‘not-afraid-of-vampires’ portion of festivities. Hell. She had even lost any semblance of healthy respect this evening in favor of ‘just do me’, which was…  _

_ /Well. Probably how Spike got most of his meals before last year, but yanno. Currently being goo, don’t care./  _

_ She felt the manacle clip around her right wrist first, then her left, and shivered. Her arms hung above her head, bent at about a forty-five degree angle, the cold metal making her skin flinch till it absorbed her warmth. She would have been anxious, but then Spike’s bumpy forehead was at her neck for a second—mmmmm—and he was breathing hard, fighting for control, while awe flooded the link between them. The timeout was not, she knew, because of the sight of her bound; or not mostly. /It's because of what I said. What I’m giving up. And why./  _

_ But the respite ended up being just as much for her as it was for him. His scent, the feel of his body against and all around her, the fizzy buzz of his presence filled her with a sense of time, place, and person… and there was nothing else. Everything was okay and right, and there was nothing left anymore to associate this with other times and places. Even the restraints felt utterly different—metal, not cloth with velcro, and she was standing, not lying down—and  _ Spike _. /Spike is here./ _

God, _ she wanted him. _

_ After a moment, she felt rather than heard him slip to his knees, and then his fingers were siding coolly around to find the closure of her skirt. It wafted down, leaving her naked to her white, strappy shoes.  _

_ It hit her in that moment. /I really shouldn’t, but I feel seriously sexy right now, considering I’m naked and chained up. Is that twisted?/ And, considering that Spike was practically falling apart over there when she was the one bound, she had begun to realize that she kind of felt oddly powerful. Which was a trip. “You okay?” she asked, casually stepping out of the ring of cloth. _

_ “Hush,” he whispered again, and stood with a rustle. Turned to, she imagined, lay her skirt over the foot of the bed and regain his composure.  _

_ No one had ever told her that the submissive one could feel so much power. It was nuts. It made no sense. But there it was.  _

_ /Talk about getting your own back./ Whatever else happened tonight, Buffy felt like she had already won. _

_ When Spike returned, he had apparently gotten his mojo back, because his voice was all firm and hard. Like, probably, other parts of him. “I have a few rules, pet.” _

_ “Okay.” This sounded… interesting.  _

_ “One. You don’t talk unless I ask you something or you need to use your safety word.” _

_ She supposed she had to give him that one, or she’d keep throwing off his concentration. Technically, blood-wise, she was his superior, so it was kind of unfair of her to interrupt on a rare occasion like this when they were trying to invert the dynamic. Especially since blood or no blood, it was just way too easy for her to fall back into ‘in-charge-girl’ mode. Which was probably really bratty, considering what they were trying to do here. /And you’ll always let me, even if it frustrates you and screws everything up. So, deal. I can do that. I think./ “That’s really strict, but alright.”  _

_ “Agreed then. Two.” His voice had gone all throaty. “No off-limits bits of you. You want to use your word, you go ahead, but once you do, I don’t touch you again on that bit of you. It’s all or nothing.” _

_ Well… that was… intense. But… she had said she trusted him. And if this was about pushing her boundaries, seeing what she could feel… “Okay,” she breathed, shaky but sure. /There’s always that good old safeword. And there’s always next time, if I’m not ready for something this time and I need to think about it, right? It’s not like ‘not now’ means ‘never’./ _

_ “Right then. Three,” and now his voice was shaking as if he hadn’t been able to believe that she’d agreed to two (which was fair, since she was kind of surprised at herself for it). Then he firmed up abruptly, sounding oddly stern. “You don’t get to come till I tell you to.” _

_ Buffy’s eyes cracked open in shock. “ _ Excuse _ me?” _

_ His hand slid over her face, closing her eyes again. “I tell you when to come, pet. Till then, you have to hold back.” _

_ /Well… crap. I don’t even know if I can… do that./ “Uh, what if I… screw up?” _

_ “Well, then you get punished, kitten,” he answered as if it were the most logical thing in the world. _

_ /Um, wow./ “Are we talking flogging, or walking the plank, or what, here?” _

_ “Master’s discretion.”  _

_ /Okay, now he sounds like he’s having way too much fun./ Which, of course he was. He’d gotten the upper hand back. _

_ She could call this off. Except… /Spike won’t ever do anything to hurt me. Not like that; not really. And I do trust him. So…/ “This is really gonna suck,” she heard herself say, feeling aggrieved. _

_ “Actually, you might find you rather like it, love. Is that a yes?” _

_ She blew out a breath, feeling edgy but surprisingly more squirmy for all the conversation than she had been prior. There was a lot of mystery in this, and her brain was working overtime trying to figure out what he had in mind. It was a little anxious-making, but mostly there was just a lot of anticipation, because spontaneous much? “Okay, yeah. I’ll do my best.” _

_ “That’s my girl.” She felt the back of his hand graze down, from her neck, between her breasts again, like he was both gentling and admiring her. “That’s my girl. Alright, then. Alright.” She heard him step away, heard his belt buckle open, his pants unzip, heard a rustle. “Open your eyes, kitten.”  _

_ She did, and stared in shock. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, a good ten feet away from her, just watching her dangling there… and jerking off, the asshole. He had his shirt off and his jeans undone and riding low on his hips, and was pulling at himself in slow, steady strokes; playing with his foreskin the way he liked to do, his thumb flicking irregularly over the rich, pinkening head of his cock and golden eyes glowing on her while his braceleted wrist flashed in the candlelight.  _

_ She opened her mouth to ask him what the hell he was doing, when she saw the challenge in his eyes. /Oh. I’m not supposed to talk. Right./ _

_ Outrage filled her, twining with unwilling arousal as she watched the familiar sight and her body responded accordingly. She reluctantly admitted to the eroticism of watching him. He was so beautiful, bastard though he was. She felt his growing need build; as he let her feel it, pooling in his groin, tightening in his balls, his perineum, his thighs, curling at the balls of his feet and tingling in his belly. And then, as the familiar rushing feeling began, that prelude to his orgasm… he stopped. Reached down, firmly tugged his balls away from his body; closed his eyes, breathed long and deep. Nodded, and stood up. “Christ, you’re gorgeous,” he whispered, “your eyes on fire like that. Lookin’ at me like I’m a traitor. Like you’d like to bloody kill me.” And to her amazement he actually zipped up his jeans over his cock—which had to be incredibly painful… Oh yes, she felt it, and it was—and stalked over to face her.  _

_ She opened her mouth. Closed it again, helpless without her words, such as they were. _

_ “Go ahead and ask, kitten.” _

_ “Why…” She didn’t even know where to begin. Why chain her up and then jerk off in front of her? To prove he could? To give her some kind of show? To piss her off? And then, if he was going to, why stop before he… _

_ “If you don’t get to come, pet, neither do I,” he informed her softly. “Not yet, at least. But you’re so bleedin’ gorgeous, I just had to take a moment.” _

_ “Wh…” /You did it because you wanted to be  _ fair?/

_ He had the weirdest sense of fair play in the universe, her amoral vampire. _

_ Smirking, he moved closer, pressed a finger to her lips. “Close your eyes,” he repeated the old instruction. _

_ Biting off about seven retorts, Buffy did as she was told. And felt her body jerked hard against the roughness of his jeans, the incredible hardness there. “Feel what you do to me, kitten?” _

_ She bit back a moan, wondering if he would grind against her when she was all bare. Those jeans would be… really a lot. Also, she had half-expected him to call her ‘Slayer’ just then… but he hadn’t. He was all vamped out, all demon-y, but he was still speaking to the woman in her and not the Slayer at all. It was weird. It was confusing.  _

_ And she couldn’t ask. Not if she was abiding by the rules, anyway. _

_ “No coming,” he reminded her, and then he ducked without fanfare to fling her left leg over his shoulder and was diving for…  _

_ /Okay, you know what? We’ve been doing this for way long enough for me to say words, at least in my own head./ He went straight for her pussy and was doing what he loved best, and she couldn't put her hands on his head because they were restrained, so all she could do was hang on with all she had to the chains and rock forward against his face and hold on and pray she could figure out how not to… how to tell him when to… Because if he didn’t, then she would… She wouldn’t be able to… _

_ It got to that point way too soon, and she was trying to jump away, making desperate noises behind her teeth; and he seized her hips in his hands and thrust two fingers, hard, into her. “Don’t. Come,” he told her firmly, and settled back in to some little side-ventures that kept her just that much on edge; that let her take a little bit of a breather. But not for long, and then he was right back to where she couldn’t…  _

_ All other communication taken away, she resorted to pushing, kicking, desperate ploys to get him to stop; heard him chuckling at her gasping breaths and pounding heart… and then he was back to his merciful little cruelties while she stood on her tip-toes on her one foot, and fought for equilibrium. And vibrated.  _

_ This went on so long that Buffy was starting to feel wrung out, strung out… and more than a little desperate. She thought if he didn’t let her get off soon she might actually brain him with her shoe. Which, of course, would solve nothing, since it would only leave her dangling here with no means of fixing the situation, but it would at least stop the torture. “You wanna come, kitten?” _

_ Panting, gasping, all but sobbing for breath, and  _ aching, _ she opened her eyes to glare at him, stunned and incensed.  _

_ The asshole laughed aloud. “Then you have to let me do something first.  _

_ /Okay, here we go./ _

_ And then his hand was over her eyes again. Biting off a few more imprecations, trembling with need, she closed her stupid eyes and forced herself to wait for whatever evil thing he had in mind to do to her next. It was bridling… and weirdly arousing to just dangle there in midair; trembling, unfulfilled, and just waiting to see what… _

_ /God, please let him be ready to get in me, because it’ll be hard as hell not to come right away, but at least he’ll be having a hard time too, and maybe I can make him go, and then I can.../ _

_ Something cool and slick touched her, um… backdoor. Not what she had expected. She jumped a little and pondered using her word.  _

_ “Well?” he asked, waiting.  _

_ She held her breath, then raised one finger.  _

_ “Question?” _

_ She nodded. _

_ “Alright.” _

_ “Why?” she asked softly. “Why now, and not… some other time?” _

_ He pondered that for a moment, then… “Because… I’m thinkin’ of tryin’ it again, with you,” he informed her softly. “Because I trust you that much, and I miss it. But I’m gonna feel right helpless, and maybe a bit terrified for a mo’, here and there, and I think it’ll help you to understand a bit of what it feels like, and how to go about it… especially when it’s a vulnerable thing.” _

_ “Oh.” That… actually made a lot of sense. And also, it was scary, knowing that he never did anything without intent. Not that she didn’t know that. Everything in their mutual sex life taught her something; about herself and her own wants and preferences, or his.  _

_ It also explained a little of why he was all Mr. Game Face right now. He was kind of protecting himself a little. She wondered if he would be when they… did this for him. “But… it’s good?” _

_ “Yeah,” he answered softly, fervently. “And I’d love to know how it feels for you. Because it’s bound to be different… but also, it’ll remind me.” _

_ /Oh./ Closing her eyes, she drew in a deep, shaky breath. /It’s good, he says it’s good. He said he’d make it all so good for me. People do this. If I don’t like it I can opt out./ Also, despite the fact that the shock had dropped her arousal down a couple of notches, his frankness and the images he had given her of possible future engagements had replaced her on-edge desperation with a kind of heated tenderness that made her want this almost as much for him as out of curiosity. “Okay.” _

_ His mouth was on hers before she realized what was happening, and she kissed him back fangs and all, surprised and elated by the suddenness, the rough emotion in the kiss. It wasn’t the first time she had kissed him when he was fanged out, and he always took care, but this time he seemed a little more desperate about it, and she thought she felt him tremble a little, touched her tongue lightly to one exposed and pointed canine in a bid to slow him, calm him. _

_ He rolled away from her, his bumpy forehead pressed to hers. And then his dry hand was at her poor, overworked clit, and she was clinging to the chains again and biting her lip as her banked need came roaring ferociously back; and she abruptly forgot the rule about talking and had started some kind of crazed stream of consciousness that sounded like “ohgodspikeican’tpleaseyouhavetostopifI…” And then his slick fingers were tickling at her rear again, and it actually did feel kind of good, and anyway it distracted her from what he was doing up front, which was pretty necessary right now if she wasn’t going to come, so she focused on that as he pressed. And that was uncomfortable, and she tried to relax, and… “Push back against me,” he advised her. _

_ /Huh?/  _

_ It took her a minute to catch what he was saying, and it was counter-intuitive, but the second she did… “Oh!” _

_ “Just take a mo’ to get used to the idea, pet.” _

_ She needed to. This was like losing her virginity all over again… except totally not. Her body was kind of fighting back. She lowered her head to his shoulder and breathed. /I don’t know…/ _

_ And then he did the thing to her clit again, and, torn between two poles, she relaxed. And all of a sudden it felt... good. Which made literally no sense at all, and… “There we are, love.” He stood there for a moment, face against her chest, breathing with her, then kissed her breastbone. “Alright, have another, and then…” And she felt him press another finger against her, which… was he  _ kidding?

_ Except it was easier that time. Tougher, and easier, because she knew what to do, and it seemed like a lot; and yet it was faster, and then he used her clit against her and all the sudden everything was  _ good _ , and she started to realize that all that pressure felt… astonishingly  _ nice _. “Wh…” she began, before remembering and cutting off. It just didn’t make any  _ sense _.  _

_ “Think you’re ready, then,” he informed her conversationally, and slipped his fingers away.  _

_ It felt oddly wrong for them to be gone. She had just finally gotten used to them, and now she felt confused. And also, ready for what? _

_ And then he was gone from her body, and she felt something else slick pressed up against her. And this time, Spike was standing behind her, rhythmically pressing her clit as he pushed, and she went with it… except whatever this was just kept coming, and it was wider and wider, and it felt huge, and the pressure was… She was going to split in half or something, she was going to… _

_ Just when she thought she couldn’t take it anymore something gave, and whatever-it-was slipped past some wide point and settled in around a skinnier spot, and sort of bobbled inside her, which was disconcerting, but also made her throb. “Alright, then,” Spike told her, breathing hard as if he had run a race with her. “Christ. Right then. Bloody hell. That was a small one. Plenty of room left. Promise you, you’re gonna like this, pet.” _

_ /I’m gonna like what, exactly?/ She was still more than a little concerned about maybe kind of liking what was already happening. The jury was still out on how much.  _

_ She heard a clinking, and her chains loosened a little. “Hold on, pet, and bend over.” _

_ It almost burst out of her, before she censored herself, a shocked, ‘You’re kidding me!’ But then he was back against her, and the jeans were gone, and she could feel him, hard and ready, and oh god, he was going to fuck her with that thing inside of her, and he was going to feel it bouncing against him, and she was going to feel it bouncing against him, and what what what… _

_ He bent her over while she was still reeling, roughly palming her nipples in a way that had her gasping in spite of herself and arching into his touch. /Oh, you bastard./ He kissed her spine as she automatically curved into his hold. The whatever-it-was inside her moved on its own recognizance, and her clit throbbed some more. _

_ He trailed a few more kisses along her backbone… and then waited, laying his demony cheek against her ribs. “Alright, love?” _

_ She trembled. It was going to be so  _ much. _ She would either come right away, or fall apart. “How long do I… have to wait?” she asked, a tiny bit terrified of the answer. _

_ “Till I tell you,” he reminded her gently. _

_ “Oh God…” _

_ “Make it worth your while, Slayer.” It was the first time he’d called her that during this whole scene, and something about it challenged her. Which was maybe why he had done it. It pissed her off. No way he was going to win. Not this one.  _

_ /Fuck you./  _

_ “That’s my girl,” he growled, as if sensing the change in her… and thrust into her, hard, without preamble.  _

_ /Oh God, oh God, oh God…/ He was  _ everywhere _. His hand was on her clit, and that whatever was flopping around inside her… and then there was his _ se nsation… _ The overall impression of an inferno of pleasure, and pressure, and... And it was so much, everywhere, and she couldn’t… She couldn’t…  _

_ She was trembling, shaking all over, rising up on her toes with every thrust while heat and cold cascaded up and down her body in waves… _

_ “Wait. Bloody wait, Slayer,” he ground out, fingers leaving her clit to grasp her by the hips. “Just a few times, feelin’ that, and then you can bring me off as hard as you need to. Just. A. Few. Good. Ones…” He punctuated each word with a long, low, deep thrust that had her almost off her feet, keening and clinging to the chains, fighting with everything in her to hold back as sensory overload drove her to orgasm as surely as if she were falling bodily off a cliff. She was sobbing, and she couldn’t… she couldn’t… _

_ “Fuck,” she whispered, defeated. “Spike…” _

_ “Alright,” he answered, and loosed a hand to fuck her hard against his fingers. Everything that was inside her thrust, or bobbled, or twitched, and she disintegrated into her aggregate parts.  _

_ She thought maybe she felt him come too, but it was from some distant shore where things still mattered. Not where she was, in the calm darkness where people went who didn’t have nervous systems anymore. _

_ There had been aftercare, too, of course; he’d removed the toy from her and put it wherever till he could wash it, and then unchained her and actually carried her to bed, which was a first, before giving her water and curling around her to stroke her hair away from her face. “You managed that like a champion, love,” he informed her proudly. _

_ “It was… unexpected,” she admitted, feeling strangely proud of herself and also mildly thrown off-kilter. “Is it always… so much work?” _

_ “Not once you’re used to it.” _

_ “Oh.” Well, at least she no longer felt like she was vibrating. “I guess at some point we’re gonna have to go back to the house and pretend to be all normal and vanilla for Dawn.” _

_ He grinned at that. “You sound as if you’re not sure whether to be gratified or horrified at how vanilla you’re not, luv.” _

_ “Did that sentence even make sense?” _

_ “Sure it did. So which is it? Gratified, or horrified?” _

_ She contemplated it for a moment. “Mostly gratified? Only horrified in that one little reflex part of me that thinks I should be a good girl and, you know, ‘kinky sex and bad vampires, blah blah blah’. I’ve mostly got that voice down to a dull roar of a whisper these days.” _

_ “Good on you.” Nudging her over onto her back, he favored her with a sweet kiss, game face gone for the nonce. “Good girl, bad girl, either way, will you return the favor soon, my love?” _

_ Lifting her hand, Buffy had touched his cheek. “You sure you want that?” _

_ “Yeah.” A little shrug. “Got myself all jealous of you now, innit?” _

_ “Okay. Whenever you want.” She looked at her blank wrist, frowned. “Except, not now. Because it’s probably, like, what? Midnight or something?” _

_ “Yeah. S’pose we best be getting back.” _

_ “Yeah. Sadly.”  _

_ He started to move off of her. She caught his face and pulled him back into another kiss. And when he lifted away, “I love you. You’re insane, but I love you.” _

_ He grinned down at her. “Same.” _

_ “Now go wash your hands. And that whatever it was.” _

_ “I tell you what it’s called, you’ll never let me use it on you again.” _

_ “Then don’t tell me.” _

Turning over in bed, the morning after, Buffy cast her left arm over her head to eye her guy thoughtfully. “I thought of something kind of irritating last night, but I didn’t want to bring it up, because I was being all ‘obedient-girl’…”

“Yeah?” Spike queried, sounding interested. “And you held back from hitting me over the head with it to stick to your role? Who bloody knew.”

“Oh shut up. I didn’t want to break your concentration.”

“Ta ever so.” Shifting a little, he eyed the window longingly. “Do I need a fag for this conversation?”

Buffy rolled her eyes at him. “I was just thinking that my underwear drawer is getting a little thin, and that maybe you should contribute to the inventory if you’re gonna keep permanently borrowing the stock.”

A wide grin spread over his face, and he rolled his tongue up in that irrepressibly dirty way of his. “You gonna set me loose in the lingerie shops of Sunnydale, is it, and wear what I choose for you?”

“Within reason. And only if I know you’re buying them using cash you’ve earned. Not, you know, ill-gotten-gains underwear. Like, I don’t want some kind of creepy stolen underwear from an underwear-smuggling ring, or…”

He made a derisive noise. “No such bloody thing, pet, and you know it.” He sobered, looking thoughtful. And then, to her growing concern, a light kindled in his eye. “Will you come along?”

She leaned away, frankly worried. “Why? Afraid to be seen in the ladies’ lingerie aisles of the mall?”

Spike’s lips twitched. “No. More was hopin’ you might model ‘em for me.”

She wapped him on the arm. “You don’t model underwear, you dope. They can’t sell ‘em if they’re already used.”

“Oh.” He deflated like a pricked Thanksgiving float. “How the bloody hell do you know if they look good, then?”

/You’re such an idiot./ “You pick the ones you like in your size, dork, and hope for the best. Jeez.” Shaking her head, she sighed for the predictable vagaries of the male animal. In this, Spike was exactly like any other non-gay guy in existence. “Also, knowing if they fit is as important as how they look, duh. Which is also something you don’t get to know till you bring them home.”

“Well, that’s a bloody racket,” he conceded.

“Yes. Luckily you  _ do _ get to try on bras, because that’s seriously tricky; much trickier than finding fitting underwear.”

His eyes lit up again. “So you could model those, then.”

“Hey. Don’t go getting any funny ideas. You haven’t stolen any of my bras…”

“You’ve just given me incentive, haven’t you.” He leered.

“God, you’re predictable. Also, you don’t win enough at poker in a whole week to cover what new bras cost. You have no idea. They’re insanely expensive; so don’t even  _ think _ about wrecking even one of ‘em. The undies are bad enough to replace.”

His scarred eyebrow went up. “What, how much do the bloody things cost?”

“A fortune. I’m not kidding. You’d think they were hand-stitched by blind nuns in France, not machine-made by starving children in Singapore.”

“Huh.”

“Also, please don’t ever try to buy me one as a gift. You’d never get the fit right.”

He eyed her chest significantly, then made to cup one breast with a faint, studious expression. “How much could there be to it, though? Just this bit, and…” His fingers traced around under her arm, lips moving as if he were counting invisible inches.

/And here’s our proof that Miss Nuts ‘n Bolts always wore corsets or whatever./ Spike was clearly as untutored in these matters as any typical male.

It was kind of heartening to be able to teach him something new in the way of relationships. “Seriously. Don’t. There’s a science there that requires mother-to-daughter tutoring and takes years to master. You can’t just go into Victoria’s Secret with your hand cupped and say, ‘She’s about a this. Got anything lacy?’”

That earned a grin from him. “Right; I’ll leave the brassieres to you, luv. But I do get to watch sometimes, innit?”

He was incorrigible. “I’ll put on a private show for you sometime.”

He bounced a little, happy as a puppy told he would get a special treat with supper. “I love you, Slayer.”

“You’re such a boy.”

“You’re such a treat. My gorgeous…” His lips traced over her collarbone. “Edible…”

She slapped the back of his head. “You’re such a beast.”

“You can take the man out of the vampire…”

“No you can’t. You’re all of the above. And both of you are ridiculous. Now go back to sleep. I’m getting up. I need to check in on Dawnie…”

He pouted. “Not tired anymore. Slept with you.” 

Buffy frowned thoughtfully. “You did, didn’t you.”

“Wore me out, you did.” He shot her one of those boyish grins. “Was fair knackered.” Sitting up, he flopped an arm over one propped knee, tenting the sheet. A troubled expression touched his eyes, then. “I’m actually starting to be damn near diurnal, hangin’ about with you. Good thing vamps my age don’t need to sleep much. ‘S bloody unnatural how easy it’s been for me to be up days, workin’ at your side, sleepin’ with you.”

Well, technically they kind of did shifts. He snuggled her to sleep and then got up and prowled around a little more before returning to cash in, and then, barring incidents, she stayed with him till he was deeply asleep before kissing him and heading out to continue her day, leaving him well-snuggled in his turn. But he had a point. His habits had changed profoundly in the last near-year, whereas hers… 

“You’ve changed as much, pet, so don’t look all shamefaced. Your habits may not have changed overmuch, but your approaches and your thought-processes have been utterly overhauled, and you know it.”

Buffy looked away from that too-piercing gaze. “Yeah, I guess.”

“‘S why we have to be wary of those Council buggers, yeah, when they get wind?”

True. /I just wish those jerks could see… Could recognize how much better this all works now I’ve made some peace with…/

With a world they wanted to see wiped off the map. Because to them, this was a millennia-long war, and she was their instrument to win it. 

No. They would never see it the way she did. They didn’t want peace. They wanted annihilation. “We’ll… deal with them when they get here.”

“Yeah. Just one more bloody thing.” Pushing himself to his feet, Spike reached for his jeans. “Any road, they don’t signify. Mum’s the thing to be concerned about right now.”

That was definitely true.

***

The call came to pick up Mom around eleven. They got her home and settled in, offered her food, probably hovered too much. She told them to stop fussing and to let her rest because she was still a touch exhausted, and that she was just glad to be back in her own bed. 

“Why haven’t they told us yet what the results are?” Buffy asked Spike anxiously as they hovered near the top of the stairs.

“Hell if I know,” he answered grimly, and there was a hint of a growl in his voice. “Probably they’re planning on doing it over the phone so they can be bloody impersonal and drive us all barmy.”

“I made chicken-rice-tabasco-anchovy surprise!” Dawn called from below, her voice a strained approximation of cheer.

Buffy elbowed Spike in the belly. “I will make you  _ pay _ for buying her that fish powder.”

“Didn’t buy it.”

Buffy eyed him askance.

He started away, down the stairs. “Nicked it from that Oriental Market over on Twelfth.”

She had some throwing stars in the weapons’ chest in her room, didn’t she? She could clunk him over the head with one before he made it to the kitchen.

“First rule of mate-hood,” Spike informed her without missing a step. “You behead me, you feel it.”

“That’s a stupid rule,” Buffy grumbled, following him down.

They were all sitting around doing homework later—or trying—all of them with half an ear open in case Mom woke up or tried to wander downstairs. “Now, see, the thing about this passage, luv, is… You’re not wrong, but you don’t have the spirit of it. The Neo-Classicists were all about the Enlightenment and that rot, sure, but they were stodgy. They were all about the ruddy status quo.” And wow, he sounded snarky about it. “They believed in pillars. Church. State. Immovable things. We, on the other hand, believed in the ephemera of life. Love, Nature, Beauty, Death… all that changes.” His voice had gone a little dreamy, and rang with an adorable sincerity. “It’s all that you can count on, after all. The pillars’ll fall eventually, yeah? But the mutable remains. That’s what we ought to celebrate…” 

He caught her faint, amused look, shook himself free of the past. “Any road,” he went on, straightening and firming up his voice, “thing is, we got a bit poncy about how we expressed it, sure, just the same as they did. We were all great ponces back then, but the fact remains, none of those Neo-Classicist buggers had a bloody clue what the Greeks and Romans truly got up to. They’d told themselves a great load of bollocks about what it all meant with the statues and pillars and the like, and forgot every bloody thing about human nature that those myths and the like told us. It was all about ‘purity’ and ‘perfection’ and all this shite to them, whereas we had it figured. It was really about appealing to the base nature of humanity; which is… nature.”

/You were already kind of a vampire, weren’t you? Just waiting to be plucked. That’s what she saw in you. You were a… what’s the word? A hedonist dying to be let out./

Tapping the pen on the coffee table in standard, Spike-style agitation, he shook his head. “That’s what the Greeks an’ that lot were really trying to say the whole bloody time. None of those gods spent any time standing about trying to model ‘pure’ behavior or any of that nonsense. They weren’t statutes. They were all off shagging some nymph in a meadow, or tryin’ to convince some poor shepherd to let Zeus bugger him because he was besotted with the wildness of Arcadia and his own libido. And every member of the Greek army was shaggin’ each other, because they hadn’t seen their wives in twenty years, and wouldn’t know how to talk to a woman if one bit him on the…” Just in time he appeared to recall that they weren’t alone. “The nose.” He rushed on then, promptly forgetting where he was once more in the passion of the moment. “Just like most of us in my own youth, because none of us got to talk to women, locked away in schools like Eton with a bunch of rutting blokes like it was modern Sparta—till we got married and were suddenly supposed to know what the bloody hell to do with a face full of qu…” 

“Spike.” She had known he would get all fervent about this subject, but she had maybe thought he might kind of remember where he was. 

He had the grace to go a little shamefaced, if only for Dawn’s sake, a chair away and studiously buried in her English textbook; probably trying to pretend she was on the moon so she could keep listening. “I’m just saying,” he went on stubbornly, “that the real difference was interpretation… but also it was in the way you lived your life and expressed your art because of that interpretation. Whether you were free, or in chains.”

Buffy lifted an interested brow. “Which were you?” she asked softly, and wondered if she could get a straight answer while he was still busy being fanatical.

Arrested, he glared at her for a moment, then flung his pen down with a growl. “I hadn’t the courage to live my ideals till I got some demon on me. I extolled the virtues of being free, but the Apollonian life had me enchained, for all I spoke of the glories of the Dionysian rite. And I flowered it all up with talk of love, and ignored the ugly underbelly of carnality that came with it, because I feared the other side of the coin.”

/Sure. You know, half the time I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, right?/ But it kind of confirmed something for her. “So, what? You got sired and then you decided to do all the things, for ever and ever, that you didn’t have the guts to do when you were human? Eat fast food and drink and smoke and swear and get into fights and have sex and…”

“Get revenge; don’t forget that bit, love,” he put in roughly, and looked away; not because he regretted the killings so much as because he knew  _ she _ cared. “Yeah.”

She put it aside in the way she’d learned to. The deaths were a part of him, and they were the past. “You do all that now because you couldn’t as William? Because it would’ve disappointed your mom, right? Because she wanted you to be a gentleman, and because you wanted to be loved and get married and stuff, and so… So everything you are now is still all about William, but you’re just like… It’s still all about that guy, right?” She was so damned determined to sort it out; to understand. Because if her new theory was true, then that meant, when it came to… other vampires…

Spike leaned back very suddenly to watch her with a very strange look in his eye. “The Church of Satan did its best for years to pretend it was its own bloody thing, but it doesn’t even have its own cosmology. It’s just a reaction to the other, done by a load of folks as are brassed off at the religion of their childhood for hurting ‘em. A way of sayin’, ‘Look at how many things we can do as are opposite of what you’ve told us to do. Does it piss you off?’”

Buffy nodded, feeling warmed by the recognition that she had been right. And also, as if the world had taken one step sideways into an alternate reality. “So you’re still the same guy.” Nothing would ever be the same again, once he admitted it.

“I woke up,” he answered her softly, eyes far away. “I wasn’t a different me. I was new… and I was free. I was changed. But I was still me. I hadn’t… gone. I still knew myself.”

Buffy nodded and looked down. “And it’s that way for… most.” It wasn’t a question. “I mean, Harmony didn’t seem that different. Same girl, just with an appetite. She didn’t care much about people even when she was human.”

Spike snorted and leaned back in to pick up his pen. “I know what you’re asking, and the answer is, no, he’s not an anomaly. He just fed you a load of rubbish because he had to believe it. And you bought it because it made it easier on you when you needed to hear it.”

/Damn./ Getting that truth now… Well. It still hurt, but at least she could hear it now without it destroying her world. A year ago, she couldn’t have heard it at all. She would have had to destroy Spike for saying it; for even daring to imply it by his very homogenous being. Otherwise, it would be her who would have been torn in two. “Yeah. I get it.”

There was a long silence, broken only by scratches of the pen and a few huffs from Spike as he went back to his proofreading. Dawn broke through the silence after a while, sounding a little breathless. “Uh, what’s the difference between assonance and alliteration?”

Spike answered without lifting his head or the slightest pause. “Assonance is rhyming with just the vowel sounds. ‘Rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.’ Alliteration is repeating the same sound at the beginning of each nearby word. ‘Silly Sally sailed silently’.”

“Oh. Cool. God, you’re useful.”

“I try, Bit.”

Buffy’s lips twitched. Leaning over his shoulder, she peered at her own homework. “So, how bad is it, really? ‘Cause in my defense, I was super distracted. And way high on sugar. Did I tell you all I ate was Captain Crunch? And Coke. That’s it. I swear I tried, but…”

His hand settled over her thigh, cutting her off. “It’s actually quite good, pet. I just get on my high horse about the period ‘cause I lived it. Pay me no mind.”

Something expanded inside her, warm and glowy. “I like listening to you on your high horse,” she told him softly. “I like it when you get passionate. It’s cute.”

The word earned her a faint glare, though it faded swiftly. “You make some fair clever points,” he told her, wonderingly, and tapped the paper with the blunt end of the pen. “Not ones I expected considerin’ the scope of the assignment. Makes me feel good thinkin’ you… actually care about the rot I pop off about. Which shouldn’t be what I’m worried about, I reckon, and the professor’s gonna wonder what the bloody hell got up your arse…”

Buffy smiled slightly. “He caught me talking to myself about you in class and asked me if I wanted to share anything. I had a brief fantasy of you coming in as a guest-lecturer to tell them all what it was really like so you could completely ruin their idea of the period forever.”

“Oh, bloody hell.”

Buffy shrugged. “I can tone it down if you think it sounds too…”

Spike’s eyes jerked to hers. “Don’t you dare. It all fits together too well. He’ll just have to assume you did some off-brand research… somewhere. We’ll find you a reference.”

“So I don’t have to say ‘interview with a Victorian vampire’?” she teased.

“Oh, sod off, pet. Any road, you deserve the marks. We’ll figure it out, because with a little tweaking it’s a lovely paper and ought to be left as it stands.”

She was really kind of amazed to hear him say that, when she’d written it about  _ his _ era, his people. “I guess I… didn’t expect that.”

He went still then, and sighed heavily. “Bleedin’ hell.” Turning to her, he cupped her shoulder. “Buffy, don’t ever let anyone tell you you’re not clever. Actually, you’re cleverer than I ever was as a human…”

Something tightened in Buffy, something that ran into an internal wall of disbelief, tangled with the part of her that had done really well on her SATs, and subsided in confusion. “Oh, don’t give me that crap,” she sparked, flinching away. “I know you’re…”

His fingers closed tight around her upper arm to hold her in place. “I was very well-read, Buffy, but I wasn’t quick. That came with the demon; the wittiness, the repartee. I’d be no match for you as William.” His fingers loosed from her bicep to rise in a light caress of her cheek. “You’d think I set a great store by the book-learning bit, but I don’t as much as you believe. I enjoy sharin’ it with you, yeah, since it’s a thing I love… but it’s not necessary, and I don’t consider it a measure of your intelligence, how much you do or don’t read. I know you just haven’t had the bloody time, but you’re my brilliant girl either way, and I…”

She was going to explode, the way he was looking at her. “Just shut up,” she whispered, and surged into his lap to kiss him. God, how he believed in her!

“Seriously, do you two have to be all oogy and make-out-y  _ all _ the time? I’m trying to do  _ homework _ , here.”

Buffy pulled away from Spike’s lips with an effort, dropped her forehead to his and just breathed, aware he was doing the same, his fingers caressing her shoulders in an odd little tattoo of reassurance. /God, I love you. How did I ever do this—any of this—before you?/ “Sorry, Dawn. I’ll just…”

The phone rang, making her jump.

Buffy swiveled in Spike’s lap, abruptly tense as hell and afraid. “Oh.”

He let her go, and she clambered down, went to pick it up feeling a little bit like she was hovering above the floor by three or four inches. “Uh, Summers residence.”

‘Joyce Summers?’

“Uh, no, that’s my mother.”

‘Buffy Summers? This is Dr. Isaacs, from Sunnydale Memorial.’

Buffy’s heart plunged to her toes, and her whole body went numb. “Uh, hi, Dr. Isaacs. Mom’s upstairs. She’s, uh, asleep, I think. Do I need to go wake her up?”

‘Well, we have the results of her biopsy. I thought we should let her know right away.’

“Yeah. Right. I’ll, um, go see if she’s… Hang on.” Turning in a haze, Buffy set the phone down and started for the stairs, Dawn’s fearful gaze and Spike’s anxious one on her back. 

The long trip down the hall to the master bedroom seemed like miles, the pause after knocking on the door hours long. “Mom? Are you awake? Dr. Isaacs is calling with the… The test results.”

There was a stirring sound from within, then a groggy-sounding, “Oh. Okay. I’ll get it in here. Thank you, baby.” And the sound of a phone being fumbled from the cradle. 

Buffy headed back down, aware she should reset the one downstairs, to give Mom some privacy. She’d tell them later what the doctor said. It all seemed so distant, though, and Buffy drifted back down the steps like dandelion fluff on a stiff breeze. Rounded the newel post and crossed to the living room like she was in a Slayer dream to pace to the ecru side-table with its phone and notepads and bills, already able to hear snippets of the tinny conversation on the other end of the line. Flashes of the room and its occupants were burned into her retinas as she made for the phone; Spike, sitting on the very edge of the couch with his fingers punching into the tight denim of his jeans. Dawn, staring over the top of her English book, knuckles white, face pale; wide-eyed and frozen. 

‘…Is an astrocytoma, which is what happens when the glial cells in the supportive tissue of the brain…’ ‘…Good news is, this type of tumor is primary, not metastatic, so you are unlikely to have cancer in any other part of your…’ ‘…Also won’t affect your autonomic functions like breathing, motor functions…’ ‘…Doesn’t appear to involve any other structures as yet, such as blood-vessels or…’ ‘You can therefore wait, and try other treatments; however…’ ‘Growing at an alarming rate, and will eventually involve…’ ‘…Likelihood that we can currently visualize the entirety…’

Buffy hung up the phone and stood there for a moment, staring into space.

It was too real.

* * *  
  
  
  
  


  
  
So... In canon Joyce had an oligodendroglioma; however this was pretty much a massive mistake on the part of the writers. Or at least it was a mistake how they ended up treating the tumor, having chosen that type. Neurologically-speaking, you would never attack an ODG surgically, because it doesn’t behave in a self-contained manner but spreads out all over the damn place. You’d never get it all trying to resect it, and it would just come back again. You could try chemo, and they often do, to control the growth rate (radiation usually doesn’t work), but because it spreads irregularly, surgery’s a huge risk and is only used to reduce size as a last resort to keep a person functional. ODGs tend to be pretty fatal, and if they can be kept under wraps (rare), the person can maybe live up to twenty years, but that’s the prognosis. Twenty painful years of recurring chemo; not an easy and uncomplicated surgery where they’d ‘visualize the entirety’ of the tumor and the patient would die of an accidental complication.  
  
 **TL:DR** , they picked the wrong-ass tumor-type for Joyce, esp. considering the treatment they ended up using for the narrative, so I fixed it.  



	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still working on catching up on comments, but getting there. Y'all are amazing. Meanwhile, here's the first moment of truth for Joyce... a bit different than in canon, and with bonus Spike. Also, with Khalil Gibran, because everything is better with Khalil Gibran, and he's in the public domain, so fight me. 
> 
> Not gonna say how I got to hear this, but I been blessed to hear JM recite Khalil Gibran, and, um...  
> *fansself*  
> Just accept that this is a toe-curling moment.  
> (though, TBF, my clothes might fall off if I heard that man recite the ABCs while doing any sort of intent look with those eyes, so there's that.)

Somehow they got a surgery bay open for Mom within the week. Something about emergency reshuffling of priorities, and a person dropping off the schedule… which Buffy kind of thought maybe was code for a patient actually dying before they could get fixed up, which was terrifying, and was it bad that she would take it? 

In the resultant kerfuffle, everything went into high waiting gear. Buffy and Spike barely patrolled. Xander and Giles took it up for them, with Willow and the witch brigade pulling up the slack with spell-power while she and Spike kind of forgot how to do anything. They went out of course, here and there, and got into scuffles with likely comers, but it was a messy, undisciplined affair every time. Most of the demon community, though, even the ones who were up to no good, seemed to have gotten the memo to stay out of their way. It was uncanny how respectful even the usual suspects were being about their family troubles. You’d think some of the more dangerous ones would take advantage of the moment to try to get away with something dastardly, but instead… nothing. 

Well, apparently there was one brief, cheap plot to open a portal to somewhere or another, but Jonathan and Tara of all people shut it down before Giles and Willow could even get there, which just went to show you how some people could surprise you.

Mostly it was all just a weird haze, from Buffy’s perspective. They got Dawn to and from school. She went to school herself. Both Summers sisters did their best not to flunk everything. Spike tried to help them not-fail. They waited.

Anya had the gallery under control, of course. Mom tried to go in here and there to prove she was up to rejoining her life, but post-biopsy she was shaky and a little mazy for two days, and she was still having headaches. Also, maybe it was psychosomatic, or maybe it was because the tumor was on some kind of speedy, Miracle-Gro diet, but she was already showing a few of the symptoms that weird, blunt Dr. Isaacs mentioned to her. She wasn’t having vision problems or anything, but her appetite seemed a little low, and she was a little wobbly here and there. She wasn’t having mood-swings, per se, but she was a little testy. Not that anyone could blame her, considering everything she was going through… and once in a while she acted a little strange around Dawn. Like she was regressing a little at momming. 

Everyone just tried to give her space and to be understanding. Buffy couldn’t imagine what it must be like to deal with something like this. It was hard enough to be on the edges of it.

Probably it hadn’t helped that that jerk doctor had told her they still had to figure out if the tumor was ‘operable’, or if she had to do chemo or something. Also, though Mom tried to put a brave face on it when she’d reported on the phone call, Buffy kind of thought the guy hadn’t had the best bedside manner about her chances or whatever. The odds. 

Mom was kind of looking tight around the edges while the care team dithered about whether it was best to cut, or zap her full of chemicals, or what.

/God, this is so insane./ Why was it that it was easier to deal with demons and plots to throw the world into endless hell-dimensions than it was to wrap the brain around stuff like this?

When it came to the extra pressure of trying to run the gallery, Anya was totally Mom’s anchorperson. She absolutely leaped at the chance to mind the store, for which Mom seemed profusely grateful. The ex-demon seemed grateful as well, for the opportunity to do the thing without interference… until the one day Buffy went in to grab something for Mom to stop her obsessing about it, and found the girl huddled in Xander’s arms, shaking her head. “…Don’t understand it. Humans are just too… frail, and easily broken. Are you saying she could actually die and… not come back? Because that doesn’t make any  _ sense!” _

“Ahn!” Xander’s head lifted, taking in Buffy’s entrance, and he blanched.

Anya appeared not to have heard the bell indicating a customer; a total first for her. “I mean, once upon a time I could have gotten stabbed a dozen times and it wouldn’t have made a single bit of difference, and you’re saying a little thing like a few changed cells in her brain could make her leave her body and… And never come back? I just don’t understand that! I don’t accept it! Isn’t there a way to… to anchor their souls to their bodies, or to make their bodies more indestructible, or… or something? I  _ like _ Joyce! I like her a lot, and… And what happens to  _ me _ if she… leaves like that, and the gallery…”

“Ahn!” Xander tried again, helplessly.

“Does it go because she goes? And  _ where _ do they go? I just don’t understand, and is this why Buffy fights so hard to keep them here? Because she doesn’t know where they go? Or…”

Buffy closed her eyes and dragged in a hard breath, feeling like a heavy weight had slapped her square in the chest. It had never occurred to her that someone like Anya, who had dealt ugly death for a thousand years, might not understand it. But then… it was a human thing, and Anya hadn’t been human for that entire millennium. She had  _ caused  _ death, but she had never truly  _ experienced _ it. 

Somehow, that realization—that she understood something that a centuries-old demon did not—was strangely comforting. “You never lost anyone, before you were elevated?” she asked softly.

Anya’s head lifted from Xander’s chest. Her face was tear-streaked, and looked lost. “I… I think I did. It was all so long ago. I don’t remember. I had siblings. Parents. People died; of plague, of illness, by the sword. Sepsis, common brawls. But it all happened when I was very young. If you lived past childhood you usually lived to a ripe old age. All the death I saw was when I, too, was a child. I don’t…” Her lip quivered. “I honestly don’t remember. Except killing the rabbits. I had to wring the necks of the rabbits, when there were too many, and send them off to be stew. They bred so fast…” Her voice trailed off, sounding haunted.

/Oookay. Not gonna ask./ “We don’t know where they go,” Buffy answered the inherent question. “I think it’s why we all make up pretty stories. We hope it’s somewhere good. Not nowhere, because that would suck. Though sometimes I think maybe that’s better than the whole heaven-hell thing,” she admitted, thinking of Spike going south while she went north, someday. Or, well, home to whatever dimension vamps came from, originally. /Still. It’s not where I’d ‘go home’ to, which means not going anywhere together. Big dimensional separation. No conjugal visits. Talk about lame. Can we get around that somehow with this mate-bond thing?/ “Or, I guess, sometimes we hope it’s somewhere bad, if we’re mad at them. But mostly it’s just wishful thinking, you know? Because we don’t know. All we know is… they’re not there anymore. They’re just… empty.”

Anya shuddered. “That’s terrifying. I mean… I saw. I saw it every time. But I never noticed. I never… cared.”

“Maybe that’s why the soul, Ahn,” Xander told her, caressing her shoulder briskly, reassuringly. “We think that’s the immortal part. An exchange for how easy it is to kill the body. So instead of living forever in this one life, we live forever afterward.”

Anya frowned, looking stumped and kind of irritated. “Well, that’s just stupid. It’s in no way an even exchange. Souls can’t have orgasms, for one!”

/You have a point, there./ “Maybe there’s other thrills, where they go? Spiritual… orgasms?”

Anya scoffed loudly and whirled away to swipe at her eyes. “I need to go fix my face. I mean, I probably look awful. Can one of you watch the counter? If a customer came in and saw me like this I could chase off a potential sale.”

“Yeah, we got it, Ahn. Go ahead. But you look beautiful.”

“You’re sweet and naïve.” Patting Xander’s cheek, she turned to head for the back. 

“You’d think you’d like rabbits,” he called after her, “since they have so much sex.”

She halted, shoulders going rigid. “They do it to make thousands of tiny rabbits, Xander; endlessly. They don’t do it for the orgasms. It’s awful.”

“Then why…”

The shoulders relaxed in disdain. “It was a poor business venture. Don’t worry about it.” And she continued toward the bathroom.

“Is this why the whole bunny phobia thing?” he pursued, clearly intrigued.

“Look. Can we just not talk about it?” she demanded sharply, and disappeared around the corner.

Xander lifted his arms to signal the white flag going up; not that she could see him anymore. “Lips zipped.” He turned to Buffy, dropped his arms. Shrugged. “Sorry about that.”

“No,” Buffy answered, and shook her head. “I think… it actually helped. And anyway… it’s not gonna happen.”

“No,” Xander answered, and pulled her in for a huge, engulfing, strength-lending hug. “It definitely isn’t. Because we won’t let it.”

She clung, held on tight, gave it back. And prayed he was right. /Even though I’ve never had that kind of power. Even though none of us have that kind of power./ “Nope.”

***

The nurses were in and out of the prep bay in a bustling mass, getting Mom all ready. All the waivers and anesthesia agreements and whatever had been signed off and all of that, and now they were just playing an agonizing waiting game. Dawn was fighting to stay calm and brave, but as the hour had dragged into two she had finally broken and pulled out her Discman. “Go ahead, baby. Nothing’s happening here till it does.”

With a grateful look, the youngest Summers slipped on her headphones and buried herself in the soothing sounds of O-Town, which were, she had informed Buffy loftily, the hot new boyband and way better than NSYNC or 98 Degrees. Because sure they were. 

Mom waited until the latest flurry of RNs and interns had left before speaking up. “I need to ask you two something.” 

They drew close, bent over the bed in concert, each taking a hand. “What is it, then, Joyce?” Spike rumbled for them both.

Tearing her eyes away from her youngest, Mom looked up from one to the other of them while wearing ‘Serious Mom-Look Number One’. Uhoh. “If it… doesn’t go well. I want you two to take Dawn.” Her eyes flicked to Buffy. “Not your father…”

Buffy felt a wave of nausea roll through her. Her mother shouldn’t acknowledge… She shouldn’t... /No./ “Mom…”

“I know it’s a lot to ask, Buffy, and with school and slaying and everything maybe it’s too much, but I think with William at your side and with Rupert’s help, you can manage it. I’ve put it in my will, though with the codicil that if you don’t feel capable, of course you can defer to your father. I just think that she’d be happier if she stayed here, with her friends, with the people she loves, than starting over in LA all over again with a parent who’s made it clear he has no interest in taking part in her life. And I know maybe that’s foolish, knowing what I know about this town, and maybe I should want her as far from here as possible, but considering who you two are, she’s probably safer with you than she would be with anyone else…”

Spike had stopped even remotely breathing. Buffy felt like she might soon join him. 

“That is, of course, if you don’t mind moving back into the house, Spike, in the event…”

“I… That is to say…”

“Though, of course this time you’d be upstairs, rather than in a converted corner of the basement. I still feel like a terrible hostess about that, but it was all I had to spare at the time…”

“Joyce…”

Mom’s voice turned flinty. “They will most definitely go after Hank for the child support he owes, with you a student, Buffy, and since…” Her mouth turned downward, and she looked deeply saddened for a moment. “I’m sorry we didn’t have time to have a ceremony; even a non-legal one. Maybe we could have come up with some sort of paperwork somewhere or… If you were domestic partners…”

“Mom…” Buffy breathed again, feeling choked.

Spike looked like he’d been broadsided with that axe for a second time. “I don’t even have a bloody income.”

Mom shot him a no-nonsense look. “You have access to a whole cave full of income if you wanted to dig back into it. And didn’t Faith say that there’s a demon-run law firm in LA? Couldn’t they figure something out to put on paper for the two of you that would make sense in the human world? And then there’s that whole inheritance you have that Angel’s holding…”

Spike gaped. So did Buffy.

“I do listen when you two talk, you know.”

“Wh…”

“And to my mind, if he doesn’t have the decency to gift your part of your family’s monies back to you if you were to get married—if not for your sake than for Buffy’s—then I’d think you might also hire those demon lawyers to sue him over it, considering Faith says they have it in for him and would probably jump at the chance…”

“Mom!”

“I’m just saying,” Mom answered, calm in the face of her daughter’s shock. “There are ways.” She eyed them both, waiting. “Will you do it?”

She was asking more than just ‘will you take Dawn’. She was asking ‘will you do whatever it takes to keep her, and keep her safe’.

Spike’s eyes lifted, met Buffy’s. His hand fumbled over the thin cotton blanket to grip hers, chilly and spasmodic. A confirmation. If she wanted to take it on, he would be right there, through thick and thin, like he was with everything. 

/Oh God./ It was so much. So much to navigate. Slaying, and school, and she knew Spike was devoted to them, but there would also be social services asking who this guy was who didn’t even have, like, a birth certificate and a papered identity; and it was one thing for her to be in a relationship with Spike and his unchipped demonyness, with the unspoken recognition that if he screwed up, she was strong enough to handle him. They both knew that codicil was there, would always be there. It had come up more than once already, in little moments when his judgement had been… questionable. They’d mostly been able to laugh it off, or tussle it out, but what if… Not that she thought he would ever knowingly hurt Dawn, but what if he just made one of his stupid-ass judgment calls or something, because he couldn’t see the consequences till it was too late? And dammit, it was one thing to have him be around her sister as an all-around rotten influence as it was; but to officially say that he was  _ raising _ her, on paper was… It was… 

It was a step beyond. Mom was nuts. 

And yet, without him, she couldn’t do it. Not well. She would screw it up, screw Dawn up. With Spike beside her she could do it, because he could handle emotional stuff she couldn’t lift with a backhoe, and… /And why am I even worried about this? Because it’s never gonna happen. You’re not leaving us, Mommy. I’m just agreeing to this to make you happy, because you need the peace of mind before you go into surgery./ “Yeah, Mom. We will.”

“Oh, thank goodness. That’s a load off my mind.”

“Alright, here we go. Ready, Joyce?” The nurses were there, and that one young male resident with the dark hair—Buffy vaguely remembered his name started with a ‘B’—and they had to move out of the way while the medical people did their jobs, getting the lines and tubes situated and helping Mom switch to another, transitional bed, and moving her IV-pole deal and monitor around, and starting her toward the door. And then Dawnie was up, and hugging her, and she was squeezing all their hands, and there were last-minute kisses to dispense… and then she was being rolled away down the long hall while they stood, forlorn and deserted in the empty room, echoing without the regular beeps of the monitor.

“Alright,” the prep room nurse told them cheerily, and began shooing them out. “The lobby’s first door on the left, and the café is downstairs on B1. Follow the signs. It should be a couple of hours, so make yourselves comfortable…”

/Right. Comfortable./

/Try not to die inside./

***

Willow sat huddled with Tara, the two of them uncharacteristically whisper-less. Buffy noted that Tara was the one who seemed to be propping up a wilting Willow. Xander in turn held Anya while she huddled against him, clinging. All of her attempts at putting up a brave front seemed to have folded the moment they entered the lobby in favor of a jittering, overloud and babbling set of inanities on a revolving door with atypical silences, as if her usual bluntness had been drowned in confusion. 

Jonathan sat on the other side of Xander, knees bouncing, looking anxious, occasionally flipping the pages of some brightly-colored comic book, though he didn’t appear to be reading it. Once in a while Xander glanced over at it, though he no longer commented on the storyline. 

Giles paced outside the lobby doors, glasses off and dangling from their earpiece. His usual reserve had faded dramatically as the hours dragged on, to be replaced by a strange air of anxious regret. He always acted like he and Mom didn’t have that… thing they had back during the band candy deal, but Buffy knew he was really fond of her mother, even if they had landed on being friends. Strained ones, for a while there, during Mom’s disappointment over Giles’ stance about Spike, though that strain had faded in the last few months, and they’d returned to their previous casual, mutual respect with a side of shy smiles and not-quite-flirting, all of which tended to freak Buffy out a whole hell of a lot. 

/They’re friends./ Friends, she really hoped, without benefits. Not that she didn’t want her mother to have fun, but it would just be too weird. And also, if people had… benefits, and got too close, it was way too easy for them to screw it up and break up and leave, and…

/And I have problems./

Dawn shifted, curled up half in Spike’s lap and about three-quarters into avoidance-sleep. He stroked her hair absently, his other hand doing the same to Buffy’s. He prodded the air with his chin, indicating Giles. “What’s his bloody problem, then?”

Buffy looked away from her Watcher. /You might as well know, I guess./ No telling how her guy would take it, of course, but in the interest of full disclosure... “He’s probably wondering if he should have said something, or not said something. He and Mom had…” /Ugh; how do you even classify that?/ “I guess kind of a fling? A while ago. It was while you were out of town with Dru in South America or wherever; right before you came back to get the love spell stuff. They were under the influence of some crap Ethan Rayne put in a bunch of chocolate, but still. I think they really hit it off for a while there… and I really don't want to know any details.” /And I’m really, really upset that I know the details I do know./

Spike turned his most calculating gaze on Giles, brows drawn together a little forbiddingly. “He shag her?”

“And the award for things a daughter most doesn’t want to know about her mother and her adoptive father goes to…”

Spike shot her an aggrieved glance, as if he thought she was obstructing justice or something. 

“Fine. Yeah. They did the wild thing. Please, oh please, don’t make me repeat the things I heard about that whole fiasco, much less  _ how _ I heard them. I’m already scarred for life.”

Spike rumbled a low growl. “He just better have seen to her proper, is all. Lady like Joyce deserves to be taken care of. He didn’t, and I find out about it, I’ll have his ears.”

/Are you  _ kidding _ me?/ “You’re certifiable, you know that?”

“I’m just sayin’.” 

He actually looked murderous. And she needed to head this off, because this had all the earmarks of ‘Spike, currently considering taking his misguided aggressions out on Giles because he’s British and wears tweed and is thus the anti-Spike’, or something. “Do you know what a ‘stevedore’ is?” At the very least it would maybe satisfy a longstanding and incredibly morbid curiosity. She had never remotely brought herself to look it up, but maybe if Spike dropped a hint it would be enough to not feel stupid, without hearing too much fine print to be able to continue living.

Spike jerked away from his violent contemplation of her Watcher to stare at her in confusion. “A dock-worker. They tend to be very tough, virile sorts, and to work long hours non-stop without tiring…” He halted abruptly and went very still. “Oh, bloody hell.”

/And that was way more than I wanted, dammit./ Trust her guy to be a walking dictionary when she least preferred that particular function. “Oh,” she answered, flinching. /Filing that under things I never, ever wanted to know./

“Well, well, Rupert,” Spike put in, sounding amused. “Good on you, then.” With a grunt he looked away, back toward the far wall. “Not sure I forgive him, any road, if he left her alone after.”

Buffy shrugged and leaned back against his arm to close her eyes. “I think it was a mutual decision.”

Spike exhaled noncommittally. “Reckon if Joyce decided they didn’t suit, that’s her prerogative.”

“Or maybe they both thought it would muddy things up or whatever.” And Buffy could not even express what a relief that was for a certain Slayer.

Spike’s expression twisted. “‘S already muddy, pet, if they’ve gone down that road at all. In any case, they share you, either way.”

Buffy so did not want to think about that. “I just wish this was over.”

“I know, love.”

Time dragged on. Xander made a snack run. Hardly anyone ate the proceeds. Everyone drank bad coffee that kind of tasted like wet paper. The clock made a concerted effort to run backward. Giles did some more pacing. Spike looked like he really wished he could join in, but couldn’t because he was serving as a pillow for a lanky, depleted teenager who hadn’t really slept in days and had taken this insane moment to collapse into nervous exhaustion. Buffy wished she could check out similarly, but couldn’t seem to manage it… or even that she had had the foresight to bring along some homework, or something to read.

Jonathan tried to hand her the comic, babbling something about how it was ‘a compilation of the Reign of the Supermen series following the Death of Superman’, and how it was ‘hugely compelling stuff’. Xander chipped in on that last, muttering something about four claimants to the throne and a surprise twist, but Buffy waved them off with a faint, nauseous shake of her head.

Which was when Spike surprised her by slipping his hand inside the breast pocket of his duster and, right in front of everyone, pulling out a tattered, dog-eared copy of a very familiar book; one she had not seen outside of nights snuggled up together in bed at the crypt. Without speaking a word, he opened it and began reading quietly to her in that voice of his that, as a general rule, tended to make her clothes fall off, though in this case and what with all the current interference, it mostly fell into her brain’s programming language as ‘soothing’, at best. 

“‘Defeat, my defeat, my solitude and my aloofness…’”

/Okay, weird choice…/

“‘…You are dearer to me than a thousand triumphs…’”

/And getting weirder./ 

“‘And sweeter to my heart than all world-glory. Defeat, my Defeat, my self-knowledge and my defiance…’” 

Okay, now she really needed to know where the poet was going with this, because as far as she knew, defeat wasn’t sweet at all. Though she got how you could get some self-knowledge out of it; of the bitter kind.

“‘…Through you I know that I am yet young and swift of foot, And not to be trapped by withering laurels. And in you I have found aloneness, And the joy of being shunned and scorned…’”

All eyes were on Spike now, as he quietly declaimed. He ignored the inquiring gazes, eyes firmly focused on the book, held at arms length in that way that told Buffy that he probably didn’t have perfect eyesight for this task. Hunting acuity, yes, but reading, not so much. It made her wonder sometimes if, in his human life, he’d had glasses. 

“‘…Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield, In your eyes I have read… That to be enthroned is to be enslaved…’”

/Huh./ That one hit home. You could lead, win, whatever… but there was no freedom in it. You got controlled by the job, the honor of it. There was a freedom in screwing up, failing, having the room of not having any expectations to live up to. Unless, she guessed, everyone expected you to _ only _ fail, like they did with Faith, or with Spike. /Maybe it’s tough either way; to be expected to only fail, or only succeed, and the only freedom is in the middle ground. Like a lottery./

“‘…And to be understood is to be leveled down… And to be grasped is but to reach one’s fullness, And like a ripe fruit to fall and be consumed…’” 

Giles wandered closer, seemingly calmed in his peregrinations by the familiar sound of poetry. 

“‘…Defeat, my Defeat, my bold companion, You shall hear my songs and my cries and my silences…’”

There was that freedom, then. What must it be like, to be allowed to fail, and be left alone to just… make your way? Was it scary? Was it wonderful? 

She kind of wanted to ask Faith. 

“‘…And none but you shall speak to me of the beating of wings, And urging of seas, And of mountains that burn in the night, And you alone shall climb my steep and rocky soul…’”

/Wow./

“‘…Defeat, my Defeat, my deathless courage, You and I shall laugh together with the storm, And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us…’”

That one also hit hard. Hit with the weight of a bare room in LA, with blood on her hands.

“‘…And we shall stand in the sun with a will… And we shall be dangerous.’”

/Well, holy fuck./ Buffy closed her eyes and drew in a long, deep breath, the final words uplifting her. “Thank you,” she whispered. “That was exactly the one I needed. Who was it?”

“Khalil Gibran,” Spike told her, sliding a finger into the book for a moment to mark his place, and kissed the top of her head. “Man was a bloody genius. Want another?”

She snuggled down against his arm, held on, laid her cheek to his shoulder. “Yeah.”

“I’ll pick up the pace a bit. Give you old Dylan. He’ll make you want to kick every sod’s teeth in.” Closing the book firmly, Spike leaned back and shut his eyes. 

“Wh…”

“Don’t need the book for this one, pet.” He cleared his throat, and his face settled into ‘recitation mode’. “‘Do not go gentle into that good night…’” he began, sounding kind of fighty. And promptly built into a slow crescendo that peaked at the end in a way that was almost orgasmic. He’d have roared it if they weren’t in the hospital… but he still managed to make it have that effect, sotto.

He was right. It did make her want to get in a fight. How Dawn slept through that performance was beyond her.

“Well, wow,” Xander broke in after a moment, looking startled. “That one was… I mean, I’m not into poetry, but that one got me kind of…”

“Hot?” Anya suggested, eyes sparkling.

“I mean,” Jonathan put in breathlessly. “I’ve read it before, but not… like  _ that _ .”

“It is a wildly popular work,” Giles put in dryly, “and has been for a good many years. With reason.”

“Willow,” Tara said, smiling prettily in Spike’s direction, “would you think badly of me if I decided I had a crush on Spike? Just for tonight? I’m sure Buffy wouldn’t mind.” 

“Plenty of me to go around, pet,” Spike put in magnanimously. “Can’t take credit, a’ course, though I’m willin’ to ride in on Thomas’ coattails if it gets me all this lovely admiration.”

Willow smiled faintly. “I wonder if there’s a way to determine now much sweet lovin’ Dylan Thomas got in his day. He sounds like he was kind of a rock god, poetry style.”

“He certainly lived like one, by all accounts,” Giles put in. “Left Wales to go to New York, tried to make a living as a writer, became a boisterous drunk, died at thirty-nine; probably of liver failure.”

“Live fast, die young,” Spike responded, and lifted his flask in memoriam.

“Well, that sucks,” Jonathan breathed, looking regretful.

“Rock star for sure,” Xander agreed, and turned to Anya. “Did you meet him?”

Anya looked put upon. “I didn’t meet everybody, Xander. No one wished him ill; at least, not to me, so I had no reason to meet him.” She lifted her eyes over the row of hard seats. “You, Spike?”

“Wasn’t in Merry Old or the Apple at the time.”

“Where were you? When was this?” Buffy was curious, and grateful for any subject that wasn’t brain surgery, her mother, or the possibility of hovering mortality. 

“Forties and fifties. Spent a lot of ‘em in Germany and Italy an’ the like. An’ some of ‘em swimming.” The last was spoken with a faint twist to his lips.

“Okay, swimming?”

He stilled for a moment the way he did when he was hesitating about telling her something, then… “Initiative wasn’t the first time I had a run-in with a load of twisted bastards wanted to figure out what made demons tick. First time around was the Nazis…”

“You’re kidding me.”

He shot her a grim look. “Told you I knew what they were about.”

/Yeah, I guess so./

“Anyway, they captured me and a few other old vamps with the oldest trick in the book. Bait and switch, and put us in a submarine.” He shrugged philosophically, and avoided her eyes. “Course, we did what vamps do under such circumstances; tried to eat our way free.” 

/Oh. Well. Like ya do, I guess./ Every time she heard something about one of his past… exploits, Buffy experienced some strange, ambivalent space that existed in between ‘disgusted’ and ‘numb’. After all, nothing could be done about it now, it was the past, he wasn’t killing anymore… and yes, it still bothered her that he felt as little remorse about the killings as Anya did the torments she’d inflicted on her victims, but what could Buffy do about it? What could Spike even do about it? He simply wasn’t wired in a way that allowed him to feel that remorse.

“‘Cept,” Spike went on, monotone, “I guess the sub was bein’ taken over by Yanks for some reason, so the Americans sent bloody Angelus…” His lips twitched. “Angel, in, as he was able to handle the pressure at that depth…”

Now,  _ that _ she had not expected. /I thought he spent a whole hundred years basically moping over his soul./ 

“He staked Nostroyev, this tosser who was Rasputin’s lover…”

“I  _ knew _ Rasputin had some sort of connection with vamps!” Buffy burst out, unable to restrain herself. “Do you think he was one, too?”

Spike was eyeing her with no small amusement. “No clue, pet.” He seemed bemused at her having chosen to key in on this particular part of the story rather than the rest. “He staked the Prince of Lies as well, later on. Probably would’ve staked me too, could he have gotten away with it. And since he needed an engineer who could fix up the sub, and the only bloke as could do the work was stabbed in the gut by one of the Nazi prisoners, he sired the poor tosser just to keep him among us to do what was needful. Minute the ship breached the waves he kicked us both out. Made us swim for shore. Barely made it before sunrise.” Spike shrugged. “No bloody clue what happened to Lawson. Poor sap. Had no training, no idea about the business; didn’t even get his first meal. Had no buggerin’ clue what he was, much less how to manage. Only got sired just to do a job and done. Probably still out there somewhere, all buggered up in the head and no doubt brassed as all hell at Angelus for putting him through it.”

Buffy had no idea what to make of this story. “Angel… sired someone… when he was souled?”

Spike shrugged one-shouldered. “Did what he felt he had to, I s’pose. Feel a bit bad for the soldier. They’re used to takin’ orders. Probably would’ve done well in a nest, yeah? But he had none…”

“Why didn’t  _ you _ teach him?”

Spike leaned back to eye her along his nose. “Had Dru to manage. Didn’t need another wet-behind-the-ears fledge on top of her. Dunno why I should always have to put up with Angelus’ leftovers, because he can’t bloody well be bothered to take care of his get. Irresponsible git.” Tension and a modicum of poorly-restrained fury was rising now in his voice. “I’m the bloody youngest, not a child-minder. Know I’m just a minion to him, but that doesn’t mean it should be left to me to do his work, raise his line!” His jaw tightened; a sure sign that Buffy had accidentally hit on some old, painful resentment. “It’s a bloody disgrace, is what it is, him always leavin’ it to me. Too bleedin’ much to ask, it is, and him thinkin’ he can just walk out on us like that…” As if aware he had said too much in mixed company, he cut off abruptly and vibrated, obviously dying to go smoke or pace or something. None of which he could do with Dawn pinned to his lap. 

God. He’d been abandoned by a parent, forced to be a caregiver for another… No wonder he felt a massive resentment at such a question. No wonder he felt such rage when it came to Angel. 

They had that in common too. Their fathers had abandoned them. 

She supposed she got why he wouldn’t have tried to take on a new fledge, back then, family or no. Why he hated the idea of raising fledges now, why he never tried to sire his own. He’d had to take care of a blood-maddened vampire who was supposed to be his parent but who instead had been stuck in her childish stages, and he’d had to do so for the entirety of his foregoing life; subject to her insane, capricious whims. He had loved her, of course, because he had been hers, and bound to her by blood, had only left when that bond had been broken, and him cast away like garbage.

But unlike a human, he wasn’t pulled by that kind of compassion that said to take on strays… /And yet, here you are. You took on Dawn, who’s totally my responsibility; in spite of your past. And when Mom asked, just now, if you’d… make that permanent…/

/And you love her. So how’s that different?/

God, he was changing so much.

Threading her fingers through his, she held on tight. “Claimed… and held,” she reminded him softly. “Held safe.” /I’m not going anywhere./

The muscle ticcing in his jaw slowed to a halt. He exhaled hard, nostrils flaring. Turned to her, lowering his forehead to meet hers. “Yeah. Claimed and  _ held _ . No walking away.”

“Ever.”

“Right.”

“I do very much wonder,” Giles murmured into the resultant silence, “if it might make any difference to the demon chosen, that the vampire doing the siring was souled at the time.” He sounded a tiny bit embarrassed to interrupt, but also grateful to be doing so. “One might imagine this Lawson to be a rather odd vampire.” 

Spike didn’t move his forehead from Buffy’s, simply directed his words over his shoulder. “Sod was pretty restrained for a fledge. But we didn’t chat much. Not a whole lot to say between us. ‘Sire’s a bastard, yeah? Yeah. Right then. See you never. Got places to be; have a nice unlife’.”

“I might very well look him up. He’d be a rather interesting interview.”

“Yeah,” Spike scoffed, “you do that, Watcher. Impress the Council of Wankers with another anomaly.”

“Your family does rather seem to breed them. You’ve an oracular vampiress, a soul-cursed crusader, and you, of course, with your oddly preternatural control…”

“It’s called love, Rupert.”

“Right,” Giles retorted dryly.

“And Dru started having visions long before she was sired. Was part of the reason Angelus sought her out.”

Buffy stilled against him. She had somehow never heard that little tidbit. The ‘was crazy before the siring’ part. “What kind of visions?”

Spike lifted away, catching the frisson that went through her. “Dunno. They never said. Just that she had the Sight. Chosen by God and all that rot, so Angelus of course had to rieve her away from Him, make her his out of despite. I just know it was strong enough that between it and all the shite he put her through, she ended up checkin’ herself into a bloody convent to take holy orders…”

Buffy glanced over at Giles, saw that he, too, had paled. “Giles…”

“I know,” he whispered, sounding as floored as she felt. “It’s possible.” And the glasses came off. “Possible even that she was Called,” he admitted quietly, “if she was on the run from a madman like him, so they mightn’t have been able to keep track of her. Or Angelus might have killed her Watcher before she could be rescued…”

Spike was staring, at sea. “Her what, now?”

“Wouldn’t that be in the books?” Buffy demanded, horrified.

Giles looked pained. “I rather think such a cock-up would have been an embarrassment. In which case… it might have been smoothed over, either way. A footnote, nothing more. If she was killed quickly enough, after all, the next girl would have quickly been Called; no harm, no foul.”

“Hold on, then. What the bloody hell are you two getting’ at?”

Giles shot Spike a pointed, almost accusing look. “If it’s true, it rather explains your affinity for Slayers, Spike.” He moved to take a seat for the first time since they’d all come here. “Do you think it might be a possibility?”

Spike lowered his face into his free hand, recognition flooding his frame. “Oh, bloody hell.”

“Wait; are we talking about Drusilla here? Miss Bags o’ Crazy?” Xander, leaning forward, sounded alarmed by the very thought. 

“It wouldn’t be the first time the Council of Watchers flubbed a catch,” Anya pointed out easily. “Those girls died all the time before they were scooped up; especially back before the advent of modern communication devices. Relying on a coven full of witches could be hit-and-miss when it came to tracing hundreds of girls all over the world, and the network was easily broken before the worldwide economy picked up.”

It all fit… and built to a horrifying realization. Buffy could very distinctly remember what it had been like being a Potential… and what life had been like right after she had been Called. Either way, the very thought of being sired with all that potential energy running through her, those confusing dreams and urges, just sounded… /Oh, wow./ Like being slammed headfirst into some kind of brick wall of opposing force. Because then, instead of the Slayer line to which one was heir, Drusilla would have been implanted instead with a vamp-demon; something totally opposite of the thing she had been meant to hold as a vessel. And since her brain had already been used as a conduit for visions, she had kept getting them… only for the other side. Or something. /Or maybe she can still get both, but it’s all… garbled./

“Talk about some crazy blood-magicks,” Wil broke in, sounding amazed and appalled… and maybe a little awed. “Like a hijacking. If it’s true, could you imagine the… coup it was for the Gods of Chaos?”

“Yes, well, that aside, this is all just a theory,” Giles pointed out, and adjusted his glasses on his nose with his index finger. He sounded kind of fluttery.

Spike groaned a little into his hand. 

“You okay?” Buffy asked him, concerned. 

“Knew Dru was an odd duck, pet. Never bothered to ask meself why. Or why I was.”

“She needed you.” Buffy rubbed his arm, then sighed, willing finally to admit her debt to the mad girl with whom she, too, had an apparent affinity. “But she always knew that someday you’d want to go. Find yourself. So when it came time, she gave you to me. Because I need you too.”

He lifted his face from his hand to regard her, a little squinty and as if he had never seen her before in quite the same light. “Bloody hell.”

“After, you know, a hundred and twenty years of boot camp…”

“Christ.”

Buffy tried a little smile. “After which, hopefully I’m kind of a picnic…”

His hand dropped away. “Oh, for fucksake, Slayer,” he began, his voice one low note of disbelief. 

He never got to finish, though. 

“Buffy Summers?”

Buffy’s head jerked up at the sound of her name, caught sight of an unfamiliar, blue-scrub-wearing doctor standing at the double doors.

Springing to her feet, she dashed up to meet the man, Spike disentangling himself from Dawn and shaking her awake so he could follow. Dawn trailed them, bleary and disoriented but careening toward alert as they arrayed themselves before the capped surgeon. The dark-haired intern stepped out of the doors behind the doctor, looking earnest, and stood quietly to one side, listening. 

“Yes?”

“I’m Dr. Kriegel. I don’t know if you remember me. We met briefly a few days ago…”

“Oh. Right. You look totally different with the deal on your head.”

The doctor’s lips twitched as if he was used to hearing that sentiment. “We’ve completed the surgery. Your mother is in recovery…”

The whole group was up and crowding in behind them now. Buffy felt claustrophobic and jittery, every part of her body trying to climb out of her skin. “Is she okay? Did you… get it out?”

“We were able to visualize the tumor completely, which means I was able to get all of it. Luckily, as indicated by the MRI, it had yet to envelop any other significant structures, so we can be confident of a successful procedure…”

His words were fading out like a radio going out of tune. “I’m… I’m sorry. Is she… Is she okay?”

“Barring complications in recovery, which at this point are highly unlikely, I think your mother’s going to be fine…” Behind Buffy, sounds of relieved celebration broke out; a lot of strangled whooping, the rustling sounds of hugging and slapping. Dawn sagged in relief, grabbing onto her arm and clinging to her and Spike in turn. Spike’s hand on her arm ratcheted up to almost-painful. 

Buffy stood like a statue for a moment, unable to process the sudden loosening of tension, the lifting of the oppressive weight. 

“Of course we're still going to have to watch your mother carefully, and, uh, have her back in here for some follow-up testing…”

Buffy felt herself nodding like a mechanical toy.

“…But, overall I'd consider the procedure a complete success.”

Buffy felt herself being spun around, grabbed up off of her feet. And then Spike was kissing her; a hard, bruising kiss made up of eight parts relief and two parts tears, and she was being squeezed within an inch of her life. She didn’t have time to respond, not even automatically, before she was set down and whirled around to hug someone else—she thought it was Xander—then Willow was hugging her, all teary, and muttering something about how it was a good thing these guys knew their jobs, because she had had a spell up her sleeve to use as backup if they had screwed up, which, what? Scary—and then Giles was hugging her kind of hugely and shaking, and then Dawn was more asking to be hugged than hugging her, and crying. It took Buffy a moment in there to realize she was maybe crying too.

She wiped her eyes impatiently as she let her sister go and turned back to the doctor. “Sorry. Thank you. Thank you so much!”

“Oh, please. It’s my pleasure.”

Buffy almost hugged him too, and remembered at the last moment that that would probably cripple the poor guy, settled instead for shaking his hand. She didn’t even break it. 

At some point Dr. Kriegel made his escape, and they all fell to discussing who would go in to see Mom first. At which point the young resident-guy jumped in in his quiet way. “I’m sorry to interrupt. I’m really glad for all of you that it went well. I just thought you ought to know that this is basically the same as before, with the biopsy. Mrs. Summers will be out for another six or so hours; maybe longer. We’ll have to keep her under observation till she’s conscious and able to communicate before she can have visitors, so it’s maybe best if you all take shifts; go home, get some rest, eat a meal…”

“Oh. Right.” Buffy glanced around the room at the abruptly uncomfortable, shuffling crowd. “Uh…” She looked over at Dawn. “Do you want to…”

Dawn shrugged and looked away. “I can handle it.”

Bravado, or fear? “But do you want to, or do you want to go home? I promise we’ll get you here pronto when it’s time. And it’s not exactly comfy here…”

Dawn twitched one shoulder noncommittally. “Who’d stay there with me?”

“We can,” Tara put in promptly. 

“Oh yeah. Absolutely.” Wil was all desperate-to-prove enthusiasm.

“Yeah. And I can pop my head in the door, Dawnster,” Xander chipped in. “No problemo.”

“Oh! We can play Pop-O-Matic Sorry!” Dawn sounded like she was starting to cotton on to this idea.

“Or, The Game of Life,” Anya prodded hopefully. “I always get the most cash on that one. That, and Monopoly.”

“No one will  _ ever _ play Monopoly with you again, Ahn, so let it go.”

“Looks like it’s a party,” Spike pointed out, deadpan.

Buffy slipped her hand into his. “You okay with that, Dawnie?”

“Ye…ah,” Dawn answered, defeated, and cracked into a huge yawn halfway through. 

“I’ll drive her home,” Giles put in, “seeing as the girls don’t have a vehicle. Anyone want a ride?”

“Count me in,” Jonathan piped up. “I’m out of bus passes.”

“I’ll ride with Xander. Your car is exceptionally tiny.”

“It’s economical!”

Buffy kissed Dawn’s cheek before she could turn to follow the herd out, and Spike tugged his ‘Platelet’ close for a swift, one-armed hug and a light knuckling of her head. “Ugh, get off, Spike! You’re messing up my hair!”

“Already look like a haystack. And you’ve drool on your cheek…”

“Ew! I so don’t!” Swiping surreptitiously at her cheek, Dawn glared at him exactly as if he were her older brother as she turned away to chase down her ride.

Buffy sighed and reclaimed his arm as the troops vanished through the exit. “I’m really not sure what we’d do if we didn’t have you in this family. Just so you know.”

“Likely fall all to pieces,” Spike answered sagely.

/Humility, thy name is vampire./ “Come on, you dope. Let’s get out of here for a minute and go breathe something not inside of here.”

He groaned in dramatic relief. “You are a queen.”

“You know it. Just don’t smoke all over my oxygen.”

“I’ll try to keep it to myself.”

***

“I feel like I have a cat on my head.”

Buffy stroked the wig... which, to be fair, was really kind of strange-looking on Mom. But it didn’t have a big, gaping hole in it, so there was that. “But a very well-groomed cat.” /And think of it this way; your hair will grow back a lot faster than vampire-hair, if that’s any comfort./ Spike’s scalp had stayed fuzzy and light brown in that one spot till, like, March, and had barely become long enough to make it worth dying again by June. Vampires were so completely folically challenged. 

_ “Now you see why I take such good bloody care of the coiffure, pet,”  _ he’d told her while patting at the nearby curls, trying to arrange them just so over the two-toned spot. _ “Do it any damage and it’s half a bloody year before you get enough back to be going on with.” _

Mom looked doubtful as she studied herself in the hand-mirror. “I think maybe I'll ... stick with a scarf.”

“You look gorgeous, Joyce,” Spike called from his spot reclining in the far chair, boots crossed up against one of the bed’s roll-y-uppy-things. He seemed to be enjoying the impromptu wig-show. 

“He’s right. And besides; wigs are fun, right? We can get you a whole bunch of different ones. You know, you can be, like, sixties!Mom…”

“Always wondered what you looked like as a flower child. Know you were one.”

Mom shot him a repressive glare. “I was all of twelve when the sixties ended, William.”

“We all know the sixties went on well into the seventies for some late bloomers.”

Buffy ignored their byplay. It was always the safest bet. “You could be action!Mom...”

“Proper Charlie’s Angel, you.”

“Now you’re just sucking up. What do you want from me, young man?”

Rolling her eyes, Buffy did a theatrical little hip-wiggle. “French maid!Mom...”

“Oh. Can I get a vote in for that one? Mark me down for French maid Joyce…”

“Spike, go smoke.”

Mom looked from one to the other of them, smiling. “I’m obviously getting better, because you’re making fun of me, and Spike’s buttering me up with all this excess flirtation instead of being all solicitous…”

The boots hit the floor, and Spike leaned forward intently, looking offended. “I take exception to that statement. I flirt with you all the bloody time, Joyce.”

“No you don’t. Not when you’re worried. When you’re worried or emotional you call me ‘Mum’ and act like you’re going to pick me up and carry me around looking for the smelling salts…”

“She has you there.”

Spike made a show of leaning back again. “I’m a victim of my upbringing. It gets away from me sometimes. Pay it no mind.”

Mom shook her head, a little smile still playing at the corners of her lips as she turned back to Buffy. “How’s Dawn holding up? Really?”

Buffy sighed, glancing at Spike out of her periphery. Caught his faint quarter-of-a-shrug. Shook her head slightly. “I mean, about as well as anyone can expect. She fell apart a little, but she’s pulling it back together. But, you know, we can probably expect her grades to take a dip.” /And she’s not the only one./

Mom sighed and nodded. Her eyes rose to skewer Buffy then. “What about you, Sweetie? I know you've been missing a lot of school…”

Buffy fought not to look away. “Only a little. Spike’s been helping both of us. I might have to take a couple of incompletes on some assignments, but I’m gonna make it through the semester intact.”

Mom shot Spike a warm look. He did his best to blush. “Well, as long as he hasn’t actually been doing all your homework for the both of you…”

Buffy made a noncommittal noise. /Does half-rewriting three of my essays and practically redoing a bunch of Dawn’s end-of-the-chapter quizzes count?/ 

Spike really should just become a damn tutor or whatever, if he ever wanted a day job. Of course, if she ever wanted him to go on strike, sex-wise, and leave her hanging in a permanent dry-spell, the best thing she could ever do to accomplish that goal would be to even remotely suggest such a thing. Better part of valor to keep her mouth shut.

“What about slaying and your friends? I don’t want my illness to take over your life, Buffy.”

“Rot,” Spike muttered from the vampire gallery.

“Slaying is,” Buffy expanded for her currently-not-so-verbose mate, “kind of on hold right now. Which is fine, since all the groundwork we’ve laid over the last few months means things are kind of easy to leave at station-keeping. And the rest of the Scoobies can handle the occasional randomness. Spike and I patrol here and there when the big stuff comes up, which honestly isn’t that often…”

Spike did a snarky, ‘Cough-vacation-cough’.

“…Which  _ means _ ,” Buffy translated strenuously, “that whatever the Council might think, this whole experiment is actually paying off, cooperation with the other side of the tracks is actually possible, and the Slayer can even have, like, a life, and friends, and family without the whole world coming down around her ears. Which means I can stay here for a few hours and help my mom style her beautiful new plastic dream hair…”

“What do you mean, ‘whatever the Council might think’?” Mom broke in, because dammit, she was way too good at reading nuance in Buffy’s voice, just like Spike was.

/Play it cool, Buffy. She doesn’t need to worry about this on top of everything. We don’t even know how they’re gonna react yet, and it’s like forever from now, so it’s a whole vague worry thing, and…/ “No big. The Watcher’s Council is probably just a little peeved at this whole ‘making peace with the demon world’ gig we have going here in the good old hellmouth.” /In a wider sense, and more specifically, me making a very personal peace with one William the Bloody, whenever it is that they find out about that, but you know. They can have my Mr. the Bloody when they pry him from my cold, dead, feral-Slayer claws. And they won’t be press-ons./

“Oh.” Mom frowned fitfully. “Why, if it’s working?”

“Because they’re thickheaded, stodgy old prats,” Spike put in succinctly.

Mom sighed and lifted her hands to tug the wig off of her head. Buffy blinked, arrested mid-artful-arrangement, left holding the brush with nothing to fluff. “Wh…”

“Why don’t you two get out of here? You don't have to keep me company all night. Go out, have fun. You have too many insane things pressing in on your lives as it is. Go see a movie or something, since you’re going to have to come back here with Dawn in a few hours anyway.”

Buffy made a dubious face and shot the unspoken questions in Spike’s direction. /I’m really not sure I could concentrate on a movie./ “I dunno...”

Mom flicked her fingers dismissively. “Spike, get her out of here. That’s an order.”

Spike promptly rolled up off of his tailbone and stood. “Yes, Mum. C’mon, pet. We’ve been dismissed.”

“Alright, look,” Buffy answered in disbelief. “I get that you’re whipped for Mom, but this is just…”

“Whipped for every Summers woman. ‘S just, Mum outranks you…”

“Okay, wow.”

“Till we’re alone. Then you outrank every star in the sky and the courses of the suns in the heavens…” He gave her a tug on the arm to encourage her off the bed.

“You think you can sweet-talk your way out of…”

“Yes.” Dragging her up, he gave her a full-bodied kiss, which he broke before she could really register what he was up to, to wink at Mom. “Be back soon with the Niblet, Joyce. Dunno if we’ll see a film—seems a lot to focus on—but we’ll figure something.”

Mom’s hand rose to forestall him. “Please, don’t give me any details.”

“Okay, look,” Buffy protested, feeling distinctly managed. “We  _ do _ do other things.”

“Oh, I’m sure you play a lot of Parcheesi. Get out of here, Buffy.”

How could her own mother sound just this side of snide and also amused all in one sentence? /And also… when did she start talking to me like I was an adult and we’re… like… girlfriends?/ 

It was weird. 

Pushing herself to her feet, Buffy tugged her arm out of Spike’s grasp and ducked for her bag. “We play poker,” she corrected. “Ish.” She felt kind of irritable.

Spike threw her a fondly amused look.  _ “I _ play poker. You look at cards and broadcast everything you’ve ever thought, felt, or considered about your hand to all and sundry with your lovely glass face.”

“You’re a dick.”

“You love me.”

Shaking her head, Buffy retrieved the wig and smoothed it before setting it carefully on the creepy-looking wig-stand. “Alright,” she murmured, feeling reluctant. “A few hours. Then we’ll be back.”

“I’ll be…” Mom yawned abruptly, and out of nowhere Buffy noticed the dark circles under her eyes, how delicate she looked without the subtle art of cosmetics she had been denied in here. Makeup was armor, and as such Mom was unshielded in this place, defenseless. “I’ll be waiting breathlessly…” She laid back, a suddenly vulnerable figure, smaller than usual.

/I’ve been selfish, keeping you awake to make myself feel better. You need to rest./ “Get some sleep, Mommy,” Buffy heard herself say, and leaned over to kiss the pale forehead, just below the shocking white of the long strips of bandage where they were secured to her forehead. 

“See you soon, Mum,” Spike agreed. “Rest well.” And he lifted Mom’s hand to brush his lips over her knuckles in that offhand, courtly way of his before following Buffy past the drawn curtain and out the door. They pulled the huge panel closed behind them just on the off-chance the staff would leave her alone for a little while before waking her up again for another round of ‘poke-prod-check the vitals’.

“I should’ve realized she was getting tired,” Buffy fretted once they were outside.

“She spoke up,” Spike answered, absolving her. “Joyce is no pushover.” He stroked her cheek lightly with the back of his hand; just a graze of the knuckles, then laid his hand on her shoulder. “C’mon. Let’s be off. Platelet’s out of school in two-and-a-half hours.”

“I don’t know how she’s doing it. I’m not doing it, obviously…”

“You’re holding the fort, though,” Spike answered, pacing at her side. “Takes a bit more concentration.”

“I have you.”

“I’m just moral support.” He snorted as he heard himself. “Which is bloody ironic, yeah?”

She laid her head on his shoulder and folded her fingers in his, wondering just what the hell she would do without him. “Shut up and take me somewhere not here.”

“Can do that, pet.”

As they rounded the corner to the elevator bank, that one dark-haired doctor-in-training popped up from behind the nurse’s station, like some kind of jack-in-the-box. His name was Ben—Buffy had finally gotten that straight after another day in the place—and he wasn’t a resident but an intern. Not that she was really sure what the difference was. Many middle-school years spent helplessly addicted to  _ All My Children _ and  _ General Hospital _ —a former vice Spike would never know about, which had taught her the perils of ever tuning in to a soap, ever again—hadn’t fully sorted the nuances for her. 

Ben was very helpful—almost eagerly so, like a sweet puppy—and seemed always to be where she was. And did he literally take every shift, or what? 

The staff had all gotten to know them pretty well here on the oncology floor, but this one member of the crew seemed to have taken a particular interest in her family for some reason. “Hey, Buffy. Uh, Spike.” His eyes darted quickly from Spike back to Buffy, sliding from what looked like some sort of bland confusion to warm and welcoming. “How’s your mother today?”

He should know. He was part of her care team. “Better. You know. Up and talking. She’s taking a nap right now.” Maybe he’d spread the word and get them to leave her alone for an hour or so, since he was trying to be so damned helpful. Though, they had their schedules, and checking a pulse waited on no nap. /I never will understand that. I thought rest healed. What’s with waking people up every ten seconds, anyway?/

“Good. That’s good. She needs all the rest she can get…”

/Hear hear./

“So. Headed out for a while?”

/That’s… pretty much what it looks like./ What did the guy want? “Yeah, we’re gonna go get something to eat, chill, come back later with Dawnie.”

“Well, good. We’ll be glad to see you later.”

“Uhuh.” Seriously. There was friendly and then there was just… overly friendly. 

Buffy’s suspicious nature was starting to ding at her. This was, after all, the hellmouth. 

“Well, see you later. Let m… us know if you have any questions or concerns.”

“Will do,” Buffy called back, too brightly, and tugged Spike inside the elevator car to push the ‘P1’ button.

Spike, it must be noted, was grumbling slightly. He had clearly smelled a rat as well. 

Buffy waited till they were on the first parking concourse before she asked. “So. Does Ben smell… you know, all human-y?”

Her vampire stuttered briefly mid-step, and looked thoughtful. “Yeah. For what it’s worth.” He shot her an odd look, a faint, sardonic smile touching his lips. “Why’s that, pet?”

“I dunno. He just seems… overly interested. It’s weird. In my book that’s kind of suspicious stuff, you know?”

Spike actually stopped mid-stride and turned to stare at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Christ, Red’s right. You really are just that oblivious, aren’t you love.”

“Wh…”

“The lad’s not a demon, pet. He’s just taken with you is all.”

Whatever Buffy had expected to hear, it wasn’t that. “He… is?”

“Oh, bloody hell. You’re the thickest bird in the universe when it comes to your own attractiveness, you know that?”

Buffy shook it off. That was all wrong. “No. I mean, yeah, I get that I’m pretty in my own way…”

_ “Excuse _ me?”

“…But I’m also completely unavailable even before I was taken…”

“Hang on a tick. Let’s go back to the ‘pretty in my own way’ bit. What the bloody hell…”

She rode right over him, unwilling to get into a long debate right now in which he would invariably spend the next twenty minutes extolling her virtues to her. He wore rose-colored glasses. She knew she had her pluses and her faults, and she was fine with all of them, knew which to accentuate and which to downplay. “Which I am. Obviously; completely taken, so why…”

Eyes still narrowed at her as if he couldn’t believe her temerity, Spike snorted mirthlessly. “Means jack shit, love, when a bird’s as gorgeous and as unattainable as you; and believe you me, we’re gonna come back to that one.” He brushed her cheek again, now smiling that one, awed smile of his that melted her. “Like the sun, you are. Blokes can’t help falling into you; like gravity.” The melty smile promptly turned instigating. “Some birds as well, ‘member?”

She wouldn’t stoop to answering that particular tease. “But… But even if I  _ wasn’t _ taken, I must seem totally self-centered to any normal guy even on a good day, with my weird drifting off thinking about stuff I can’t talk about…”

“It’s called mysterious intensity, pet.”

“And my way-too-strongness…”

“Hot.”

He was being so  _ equable _ about it. And, like, what was with the whole having an answer for every rebuttal? “And, like… right now I’m completely distracted by this Mom-thing, and who hits on someone when their mother’s in  _ surgery?” _ She was starting to feel a little dirtied, now, and more than a little offended.

Spike shrugged indifferently. “Well, to be fair—not that I mean to be—the bloke isn’t exactly hitting on you so much as he’s just hangin’ about like a soddin’ Pomeranian. Figure he’s tryin’ his best to be decent about it, but for all that he’s still pantin’ about your ankles near as bad as I was, before. Which is to say I can’t very well blame him…”

“Oh, jeez...”

“But as to his timing…” The indifference turned stony. “I think the lad might have an unconscious Florence Nightengale bit going, only in reverse. Preyin’ on those as are in dire emotional straits when they’re down, offerin’ a shoulder…”

Buffy made a face as the doors dinged open, fighting for traction against a wholly distasteful theory. “Maybe this is one of those moments where you’re applying demon-logic to humans, and if you stir in a human conscience, it wrecks the whole concept?” She really hoped so. /Because if not, then can we say ugh?/ “Maybe he's just a genuinely nice guy. I mean, does he have to have an ulterior motive?”

Spike sighed and set off for his beast of a car with her in his wake. “Can’t speak to that for certain, love. But I’ve seen the hell of a lot of human behavior over the last century… and from what I’ve seen, even genuinely nice people have an angle. Even one they might not know about; subconscious, like?” He tugged out his pack of cigarettes. “True altruism doesn’t bloody exist. If someone’s makin’ it a point to hang about that much and always be the one as is available, there’s a reason for it, even if he doesn’t know it himself. Or…” Nearing the vehicle, he lit a cigarette and held it without smoking it to lean against the rear fender of the DeSoto. “…Maybe he's the sort as just wants you to know that if things don't work out between us, he's ready on standby to be your shoulder to cry on and that sort of rot.” His lips twisted a bit in mockery. “Because he's a real nice guy, and frankly, why  _ should _ it work out between us? You're a bloody nice girl, and I'm obviously a rough sort…”

Buffy crossed her arms under her breasts, disgusted at the scenario he was presenting, as much because it didn’t sound too off the wall as because the whole damned thing made her feel soiled. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Wish the hell I was, Buffy. Sod might not be so obvious about it if you were dating someone a bit more like him, or if you were single, but since it's me, he's making sure you know that you have a friendly alternative about.” He took a long drag off of his cigarette and cast it aside only partially-smoked to yank open the car door. 

“Well, that’s gross. Like I can’t make up my own mind what kind of guy I want. And also… the whole hunting in the hospital thing? Ew, much.”

“It’s his territory,” Spike pointed out blandly, and ducked his head into the car. 

She followed, frowning. “What happened to ‘don’t shit where you eat’?”

He grunted and turned the keys in the ignition. “Yeah, maybe it’s unconscious. But it’s still a bit of a racket, I s’pose.”

Buffy felt a slow burn of rage; felt it build as the car slowly backed out of its slot. “That’s just… so gross. Like a reverse Parker. What a dick.”

Spike gave a little start, then, as if her point clicked in his head, frowned and gave a little nod. “Got a point, there, pet. Bit predator-like, innit? Huh.” He tilted his head. “When you get down to brass tacks I ought to admire him for the approach, yeah? Appreciate the wiles of an instinctive hunter; ‘specially since it’s not put on like that other tosser. All innate. Just a part of how the bastard operates.” He frowned restlessly. “Instead I’m right brassed, would prefer to go shove my fist in his teeth for hangin’ about; and not even just because he’s tryin’ his wiles on my lady. I’m offended he’s done it to others, which is...” And all the sudden he sounded distinctly uncomfortable, and very, very confused. “What the bloody hell is my problem?”

/Oh./ Touching his arm, Buffy slipped her hand up to cup his face. “You’re starting to see humans as people, even when they’re not attached to me.”

Spike reared back away from her, looking horrified. “Well, that’s just… It’s j…just…” He sucked in one hard breath. “Fuck.”

Had he actually stuttered, there?

Wow, this was really scaring him.

“C’mon. Let’s go before your brain falls out.”

They actually did end up spending the next hour watching a movie; or most of one, in the crypt. Spike was kind of morose and distracted through the whole thing, though. Well, that was, until Buffy got over the irritable-Spike show, and way over her own restlessness, and decided to take matters into her own hands. Or, well, mouth. 

One thing about dating a vampire; they were easily distracted; even more so than ye standard guy. 

Buffy thought it had something to do with the temperature differential. Or maybe it was the impulse-control issue. 

Anyway, one thing led to another. Neither of them were irritable for long.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
"Defeat", by Khalil Gibran. Just saying.  
GUH.  
(also I would pay enormous amounts of money to hear Spike doing "Do Not Go Gentle" at the top of his lungs off of a bridge or a radio tower or something. Just putting that out there. Anyone wanna get on JM for that one? In character? Pretty please?)  
  
Anyhoo. Also, putting Spike into ANY AND ALL scenes from canon makes them better. I don't care what the subject matter is. I will firmly stand by that assertion.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I really apologize for the long layover. I'm in the midst of a divorce and moving and stuff, so that's my excuse. I really feel bad for making everyone wait and for the spotty posting. My bad. Here's more, and there will be more again in a couple of days to make up for the wait. Sorry sorry sorry!!!
> 
> What happens in this chapter? *looks*  
> Oh. Right.   
> Well, nm. I'm so not gonna spoil the surprise by saying ANYTHING, except that we're very much changing the subject. And, um, there's more political fallout... and more poetry. 
> 
> VERY nice poetry.

“Give over, pet. Mum’s healing nicely, she’s up and about and back at the gallery, you’ve only the one essay left before your bitty break an’ that mad holiday where we’re absolutely not gonna make a bloody bear this time, and that bitty ring of dust-smugglers didn’t get away with smuggling anything…”

“Doesn’t…”  _ Straight punch _ . “Mean…”  _ Roundhouse kick. _ “I’m happy…”  _ Uppercut. _ “About…”  _ Side-snap-kick-to-throat-punch. _ “This guy.”  _ Front-kick-jab-elbow-strike _ . 

‘This guy’ went down, gurgling. “Look!”  _ Groan _ . “Slayer!” Spat a gob of something to one side. “I’m sorry! I just… I got high off the ambiance and got in over my… Stop  _ kicking _ me! My head! I promise to be good! Can’t I just… leave town, or…”

Buffy stood over the hairy dope, incensed. Planted her fists on her hips. “Things have been  _ quiet _ here. Then you gotta come in here and party… and tell everyone the cover is  _ middle-schoolers _ , for an  _ orgy? _ Are you freaking  _ kidding _ me?”

“Well, you know… Virgins are only going out of style because even when they’re innocent they’re not, you know, ‘innocent’…” The jerk tried for a laugh that fell flat with the current audience. He sobered immediately. “Look. It was just a bad judgment call. They’re not even good currency anymore. Hell; half of ‘em probably weren’t even virgins. These days, who knows, right? You’d have to shoot for, like, eleven to get…”

“I  _ will _ stab you.” 

The idiot monster sighed and deflated, looking down. “So, what. I’m dead, right?”

“You’re stupid is what you are. Do you have any idea how hard I work to try to keep the damn peace around here? How far I stretch the letter of the law so we can all even vaguely coexist?”

“Yeah! Yeah, I really do! I mean, things have been really good around here! For sure! I’ve so noticed. I’m not dumb! I mean, I even got to drink three gallons of Parghulagakh at the party without worrying that you’d…” His trap snapped shut, and he got a worried look around his furry, spiny eye-slots.

Buffy shot Spike a querying look. Spike’s mouth tightened briefly. “And just where the bloody hell did you import the soddin’ venom from, then, you nit; and did you use it all, or is there some still about?”

/Thank you, Spike./ Rolling her head on her neck to ease the growing knots, Buffy sighed and pointed her sword directly at the idiot demon’s throat. “That’s two strikes in one night, counting all the poor kids you’ve probably sent to therapy with your stupid party shenanigans. You’re a liability. One I can’t afford to send off to the next county…”

“Oh, man! Look. Slayer. Listen. I’ll do better next time. I made some stupid calls. It all just sounded so good at the moment. I wasn’t thinking.” A short pause and a tiny, toothy, reminiscent smile. “Or, I was, but I was thinking it sounded fun and I wouldn’t get caught…”

Buffy thought she heard a faint chuckle behind her shoulder. Her mood toward her paramour swiftly altered from gratitude to irritation, and she seriously considered throwing a dagger in his general direction. He would, after all, live; or whatever. /You’re supposed to be  _ helping _ , not living vicariously through these idiots!/ What, did he  _ miss _ it or something? “Just shut up. I have to decide what to do with you, and right now I’m not feeling large with the magnanimous. My instincts say I should already have killed you…”

The demon shot up on his elbows to regard her with a combination of pleading, fury, and frustration, while tears leaked out of the corners of his protruding eye-sockets. “Oh, that’s just great. That is so fair. This guy does it fifty times, screws up over and over, you take him to bed and make him Master. I do it and I get shanked. Right. Makes sense…”

Hit between the eyes, Buffy felt her belly hollow like she’d been solidly sucker-punched. “That… That’s so completely… You…”

Spike strode up, shoved his own sword directly into the demon’s mug. “There’s one small difference, wanker. I’ve pledged my fealty, on my knees. She can feel when I’m about to go off half-cocked, and she can command me to stop. She knows she can trust me to behave. You, on the other hand, are just as likely to do the same bloody stupid thing tomorrow night, no matter what you say; because like all of us, that’s what your blood tells you to do, and you’ve no other bit of conscience says otherwise.” Clearly disgusted, possibly as much with the situation as with the accusation, Spike turned his eyes on Buffy. They were clear… and pained, for her sake. “This one’s not on you, Slayer.” Still half-faced away and keeping his eyes firmly on hers, he shoved once, hard; a reflexive action of the elbow. The tip of his sword drove home under the wayward monster’s jaw to cleave his throat from his body, clipped right through his neck vertebra. 

A gush of dark blood shot out of the creature’s mouth. His glinting eyes bulged in shock as he stared at the fellow demon who’d ended him. Buffy thought she heard him gasp; an attempt, maybe, at, “Why?” And then he was gone.

Swinging away, Buffy took a hard seat on a nearby tombstone. “Crap.” 

She was shaking.

Spike moved to join her, sat beside her on the next stone over. It was one of those ‘marriage stones’, where the two headstones sort of fit together. “Sorry about it, love.”

“Yeah.” She looked down at her trembling hands, her bloodied knuckles. “I remember when this all used to be so straightforward. Easy, you know?”

He sighed and nodded. Jammed his sword into the ground; half to clean it and half to free his hands, then set his palms firmly against the tombstone and leaned back to look up at the night sky. “Before I came along to complicate it, is it?”

She could pretend it was all his fault, but that would be cheating. “No.” With a sigh, she turned to him, eyed his starlit profile. “I just pretended for a long time that it was so I could keep it easy. It was always complicated.”

“Yeah, it was. But you needed it to be easy so you could survive what they asked of you.” His lips tightened, regret written all over him. “I hate like hell that it’s so bloody hard on you. That you…” His mouth snapped shut, and he looked away, down at the grass.

He only cut himself off like that when he was avoiding saying something he thought would really piss her off or freak her out. “What?”

He shook his head. “Nothin’. I know you’ll always do what you feel you have to, no matter what it takes from you. I just bloody well hate it, is all.”

Sometimes he didn’t make sense to her. What else could she do? /I can’t stop any more than you can… You can stop loving me. More than that; than you can turn off the blood-link. Because it’s like that, Spike. It’s a Calling. It’s a  _ part _ of me. Just like I’m a part of you./

Didn’t he  _ get _ that?

She thought he must, or he wouldn’t always help. Wouldn’t be at her side like this, running the town with her from the flipside, doing all the things he hated doing just to make it easier on her. /You  _ must _ get it./

They remained silent for the longest time. Buffy finally made a face and pushed herself to her feet. “I need to walk.”

“Alright.”

They paced side-by-side through the cemetery, Spike kindly carrying the corpse while Buffy kept her eyes averted, till a nice empty grave presented itself, at which point he unceremoniously dumped the offender into the hole. “Better luck next time, ya tosser,” he told the body with a two-finger salute, and turned away, dusting his hands. “Hang on a mo’, love. I’m all over blood.” And he leaned over to rub his hands in the pile of dirt, scrubbing away some of the worst streaks. “Right, then. S’pose I’ll do till we get to a tap.”

They wended in the direction of the caretaker’s hut without words to spare. Buffy squatted to make first use of the spigot while Spike stood watch, dabbing carefully at the cuts on her knuckles and letting the not-quite-cold water soothe the swelling before stepping away to let her guy have his turn. He took his place as she moved away, wordlessly scrubbing at his palms, then cranked the water off and moved to join her. “You alright?”

She shrugged one shoulder, aware he could read her like a book. “I hate it when they make a good point. I mean, I know it’s different… but how much of it’s different because I want it to be, or because it feels different to me; or because I’m the Slayer, so I get to make whatever exceptions I want, because I’m the Law, or…”

“Oh, hell,” Spike answered, and grabbed the lapels of her dirty, blood-smeared jean jacket. Without further ado, he dragged her around, unprotesting, to press her up against the side of the nearer mausoleum—the Branford one; tall, imposing, with a nice, ivied overhang—and got right into her face. “It  _ is _ different, Buffy.” The intensity in his voice shook her, riveted her gaze on his eyes where they sparked gold. “You think you can’t bloody trust me?”

“I know I can,” she breathed, and felt her hips buck, automatically, toward him. And it wasn’t time for that, for all her body always answered his in this way when he was… like this. “But they don’t know that. And if that’s what they all think, then how can I ask…”

“To hell with what they think,” he answered shortly, fierce; and crashed his mouth onto hers.

Stress, fear, anger, confusion, guilt; it all blazed up all at once, and she was clawing at his neck, dragging him in. And he was fighting the same fight; had her hitched up hard around his waist, his fingers digging into the cleft of her ass through the tough denim of her jeans, was grinding into her; and she was open-mouthed and gasping as he tore his away to press demanding, sucking kisses along her neck, her throat, his hips already pounding a driving rhythm against her; and somehow she was going to have to get her jeans off, which seemed impossible, because that meant she had to stop touching him, and that made less than zero sense.

“You’re right… Should stick with skirts…”

“Always right.” Hands on her ass, he pulled her in tighter, drove her higher, and damn damn damn, she hadn’t planned this. They didn’t do this, or at least not all the way, not yet—though, why, she could not currently fathom—and jeans were easier for fighting than skirts, but skirts were so… So much better for…

One hand, up and dragging at the waistband of her jeans, and a mouth absorbing her heat to make more with her. “‘You have witchcraft on your lips…’ Oh, fuck, pet, let me…”

“I know... how?” The whole situation was inexplicable, and how had they never  _ done _ this yet? Because surely if they had, they would have had enough practice to have figured out the logistics.

His hand wormed between them, somehow, in nonexistent space, got the button of her jeans undone. Just the button, and she couldn’t. She crashed against the back of his hand, head thrown back and making a sound that could probably be described as mewling, which was awful but she didn’t care anymore, and…

“Oh fuck, oh fuck…” And he was diving in for her neck, and she saw the amber glint, knew he had gone game face. If he couldn’t manage one way, he’d manage another. “Buffy…”

“Yes.” They’d both make a mess of their jeans, but who the hell cared?

She felt the faintest prick of his fangs; just enough that she was convulsing already… and then she heard it. The dreadfully familiar, heart-stopping  _ ping _ of a crossbow. And Spike jolted full-body like he’d been electrocuted, and flung back from her, fangs ripping away from her flesh with a shocking tearing that hurt more than they had ever remotely hurt going in. 

Wrapped around him, she fell with him, already screaming, already terrified beyond measure that she would feel him dust in her hands, that he would go with her looking into his eyes… but he stayed; amber gone, eyes indigo in the night and staring in shock, with just the faintest touch of her blood on his lower lip.

The fall drove the bolt deeper, and he groaned in agony when they landed on it together. 

“Oh God, oh God, ohgodogod…” She was already yanking him up by the lapels of his duster to fumble for it, feeling… And it was so close, so damned close; just an inch above, maybe, oh god; if anyone knew how close to get to a vamp’s unbeating heart to dust him, it was Buffy the vampire Slayer, and this… This one had missed by just a hair. It had been shot by someone who knew what they were doing but didn’t have the practice to make it stick. Someone who wasn’t used to using a crossbow, or didn’t slay often, or…

Ripping the thing out at just the right angle to keep it from dusting him on exit, she threw it away like it was a live snake and crouched protectively over her guy, staring around them. The fucking thing was high-tech spring-carbon… but with a wooden tip. That was vampire-shot, with  _ money _ behind it. “Who the hell  _ are _ you?” she demanded of the night. Whoever it was, she would fucking  _ kill _ them. She would rip the bastard limb from limb. She would… 

She was rapidly heading for tunnel-vision, here, knew exactly what that meant. Hanging onto her human side was taking some serious work.

“Buffy…” Spike’s voice came to her a little shaken. “The bastard smells human… and familiar. Can’t quite place him, but… be careful.”

She appreciated the warning, but… “Right now I really don’t give a damn, Spike,” she informed him grimly.

_ “Slayer!”  _ Despite the pain he must be in, he actually managed to sound touched. 

“Shut up and let me listen. You! Whoever you are, get the hell out here; and if you even think of pointing that thing this way again I will  _ end _ you.”

There was a faint crackle off to the left, near where the mausoleum entrance lay hidden in shadow. A bulky figure in all black appeared; a faint gleam of starlight on light skin and what looked like blond hair. The crossbow was held at the ready, if cross-body and pointed mostly away from their little tableau; a stance that indicated that the situation could easily be remedied.

Something about the way the guy moved, the way he stood, seemed vaguely familiar to Buffy, but she couldn’t quite place him. “Who are you and what the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, incensed and still dealing with enraged Slayer-Line-ness and a serious adrenaline dump. Talk about three seconds of sheer, life-altering terror!

A short, pregnant silence, then, “He was going to  _ bite _ you, Buffy.”

It took her a second for the voice to register, then… “Riley Finn?” 

“I have orders to take him out if he ever bites another human…”

/Oh my God, I’m going to  _ kill _ you. You and every one of your orders-giving, bastard-faced…/ “You… You complete  _ idiot! _ I can’t  _ believe _ you’re even still here lurking around invading my privacy, poking your nose into my town! What you saw was a completely consensual act! You just shot my significant other for giving me an extra happy mid-boink…”

“Don’t sugarcoat it for him, luv…” Spike broke in, sounding way too self-satisfied for a guy who had a hole in his chest.

Buffy wasn’t even going to bother mincing words for this Nazi asshole. “I mean, couldn’t you  _ tell _ , or are all Iowa farmboys that innocent?”

Even in the dark, she could tell that Riley was gaping at her as if she had grown a second head.  _ “Consensual? _ Buffy, have you lost your  _ mind? _ You’re letting that… that  _ thing _ bite you… on  _ purpose?” _

Buffy really wished she had something to bang her head on right now. Between having her raging libido suddenly arrested with a shock of horror so massive she thought she was going to die, to being faced with this level of ludicrous, dashing her head into solid stone seemed a really perfect solution. /What a night!/ “You wouldn’t believe the orgasms,” she shot back dryly, exasperated. “Riley, get the hell out of here. Out of this graveyard, out of Sunnydale…”

Her words only served to stoke the jerk’s righteous indignation. “You’re right! It’s a  _ graveyard! _ And you accuse me of invading your… your  _ privacy? _ What kind of a girl  _ are _ you, having sex outside, in a  _ cemetery _ , with a  _ vampire _ , and letting him… Letting him…”

Spike was, of all things, laughing now. If he hadn’t just been shot very, very close to his heart, Buffy would have punched him square in the face. Instead she pushed herself to her feet, off of her chortling lover, to plant her fists on her hips and glare at the guy who’d gone out on exactly one date with her practically a year ago. “In case you missed it last year, you complete, fascist meathead, let me spell it out for you in short, easily-digested words. I. Am. The. Slayer. I. Spend. My. Nights. With. Demons. In fact, I am myself part demon. This?” She waved her hand around her. “Is my milieu. My  _ raison d’etra. _ And Spike?” She let a slow, satisfied smile cross her face. “He’s my dessert at the end of a long night’s work, right honey?”

“You want sprinkles on that, love, or hot syrup?”

She threw a pout over her shoulder, let herself secretly enjoy the way he was trailing his fingers up along his, albeit wounded, chest. The asshole would flirt when he was half-dead. He’d probably dust with innuendo on his lips. “Who says I have to choose?”

“Not I. What the Slayer wants, the Slayer gets. Spike on a platter, Spike  _ a la mode _ …” 

“That’s what I thought.” Turning back, Buffy resettled her fists on her hips and waited. “Well?”

Riley’s mouth worked soundlessly. “You’re… You’re…” His face crumpled into a twisted expression. “That’s disgusting.” 

Buffy threw him a saucy grin. “I’d say you should try it sometime, but you really shouldn’t. Vampire sex isn’t for mere mortals. I mean, this is my second go-round, and the first time nearly killed even me, so…”

“To be fair,” Spike chimed in again, “you picked the wrong bloody one the first time.”

Buffy cast her eyes skyward, unwilling to have this debate in front of a guest. “Yeah, well, you weren’t available the first time around.”

“Point.”

“I… This… I mean…”

/You know what? I’m so very much done with this; and with you. I was done with you _ last _ year./ Striding swiftly up, Buffy snatched the crossbow from the husky idiot’s hands before he could react… and cracked it in half over her knee. Which hurt a little, since it had a fiberglass stock, but it did splinter. She finished it off by whacking it against the mausoleum so that the fine fractures she’d put into it exploded into a sharp, dangerous spray of hairs and shrapnel, the wire snapping to coil up into a frazzled disaster as the limbs broke away. “You know, that was a crappy reflex. That was a really nice piece. I should’ve kept it. Oh well. Here.” She held it out. “Here’s your toy. I’m taking your bolts, though. You’re lucky I came down off of my instinctive thing where I wanted to rip your throat out and feed it to you for harming my mate…”

Riley didn’t take the wreckage off her hands; merely goggled at her, shocked at her show of brute force. “Your  _ mate? _ ”

“…Because lucky for you,  _ most _ of my instincts absolutely drive me  _ away _ from harming humans for  _ any _ reason. Even when they try to assassinate the man I love in cold blood.  _ Except _ ,” she pointed out dangerously, “the primitive Slayer part of me, which is a demon, and really kind of wants to kill you right now. So toddle off home to your base or your barracks or wherever the hell you hole up, you dick, and leave us alone _ forever _ , before I decide to listen to the part of me that really,  _ really _ doesn’t like you. I’ve been through a lot lately, including almost losing my mother, and I’ll be  _ damned _ if I’m gonna lose my lover because you think you’re better than him just because you’re human.”

Riley’s face set in stone. “If you’re also a demon, then you’re an enemy of the state, and you’ve just assaulted a member of the United States Armed Forces…”

Was he really that stupid? “Oh, please. I took your toy and broke it. Out of self-defense, because you were pointing it at me after shooting my companion because we were having sex in public. Heck, not even. Necking _ - _ plus-tax, but just to be fair, call it sex; a crime punishable by what? A little time in the drunk-tank and a fine, maybe, not execution by soldier.” She deepened her glare to a challenge. “Prove anything else.”

“A single drop of your blood will…” 

/Oh, yawn./ “Prove nothing. I have extensive medical records that show I’m totally human.” Buffy dropped the remains of the crossbow on the ground and snatched the quiver of bolts from his hip, held it away from his reflexive grab. “My demon’s in my spiritual essence. Find a way to test that. I’ll wait. Hm. These are pretty.” They were; all springy and carbon-y and bouncy. “Thanks.” Turning back to Spike, she dismissed Riley with a backhanded wave. And watched as her guy gamely made to push himself up off the ground, now that the coast was clear. He was moving very, very slowly and painstakingly, and the starlight gleamed off of way too much blood on his shirt, on the duster…

A flood of rage bowled her over, so vast it almost knocked her down. For a second she completely forgot that Riley Finn was human, and she badly wanted to cause him excruciating pain. “Tell your bosses I’ve got the town totally under control,” she bit off, “and we don’t need any of your help. Oh, and Riley?” She shot him a glance over her shoulder as she knelt in front of Spike. “If I ever see you again, I might not hold back.” And without further ado she tossed aside the tiny quiver and held out her wrist. “Here.”

Spike lifted his eyes to hers, the question in them for the audience. 

She answered with a level, certain look. The audience didn’t matter. He didn’t even exist.

A flicker of acknowledgement; an unspoken, ‘Alright, then.’ And Spike took up her wrist, pressed a kiss there in thanks, opened his mouth in a slow, sucking, blunt bite to ready her. She breathed with him, feeling Riley’s eyes on the back of her neck, shocked and horrified. Then fangs, sliding in; the low, familiar, piercing ache, and the slow, deep pulling that seemed to draw from somewhere deep inside her. And yes, even in these dire straits she felt her body answering; her nipples drawing tight, her clit beginning to respond. 

He groaned as the beginnings of her arousal scented the air, as the richness of her blood eased his pain and made it possible for him to answer her in turn. And then he was licking her closed to pant against her, his cheek turned into her palm. “Christ, love, oh bloody hell, Buffy…”

“Well. One way or the other, huh?” she murmured hoarsely. “Better?”

“Will be soon enough.” He turned his forehead into her palm, caught her hand with his other so that she was held between his two. And, as always, renewed his vow. “Yours. Always yours.”

She could give it back to him now. “And yours.” She stroked his escaping curls back away from his eyes. God, the way he looked at her after he’d had her blood. “Can you get up?”

He snorted faintly. “Give me ten minutes and I can shag.”

/Dope./ “I’ll take it. You scared me half to death. I might need some reassurance that you’re really still here.”

“Always at your service, Slayer.”

She stroked her fingers through his hair again, dropped her thumb to touch the punctures at her wrist. They had already pebbled over. “He still there?” she asked, wondering if she was imagining the feel of hard, incredulous eyes on the back of her neck.

“No. He scarpered along about when you offered yourself up. Probably didn’t want to watch, or was afraid he couldn’t control himself without jumping in, an’ you might kill him for interfering…”

“Which I would have,” Buffy answered grimly. “Asshole.”

“Think you scared him proper, pet.”

“Good.” Turning her head, Buffy glanced behind them. The doorway of the mausoleum was empty. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Patronizing jerk. 

“Would you really have?” Spike asked wonderingly.

“Hmm?” Turning back, Buffy set her feet and, hands still clasped in his, heaved him to a standing position. He swayed a little, but stayed upright well enough. “You okay?”

“I’ll do.” He eyed her quizzically, head tilted a little as if looking for something. “You would have, wouldn’t you?” he went on, sounding awed.

“What?” she asked, slipping an arm around him to help him in the direction of the gate. Luckily the car was nearby. It was a long drive to… well, anywhere, from here. She supposed she could take him to Revello, but she would prefer the dorm or the crypt, since she kind of really did want to reassure herself of his nice, solid, undustyness. Speaking of, her pants were going to fall down if she didn’t rebutton them, and hah. She’d had that whole conversation with Riley Finn with her jeans unbuttoned. Oops.

Oh well.

“You would’ve killed the tosser, wouldn’t you? Human an’ all?”

Having paused to do up her pants, Buffy stilled and lifted her head to eye her guy. Frowned pensively into the distance… and sighed in defeat. “If he’d dusted you I would have ripped his head right off and never even felt bad about it,” she admitted. “And never recovered from the guilt that I missed hearing him, somehow, and let you get…”

“Buffy. Love…”

“I almost did it anyway.” It came out on a sharp, taut breath, and the realization terrified her. But it was true, and how much of her other side was engaged by this… this mate-y-ness? Did it sometimes eclipse her human-ness, or whatever part of the Slayer was devoted to the protection of humankind? 

Would it eventually make it hard for her to do her job right? Care about the humans she was supposed to protect? /I don’t kill humans, I save them. I…/

Spike stopped her with a simple touch to her cheek. “Self-defense, or defense of a loved one, isn’t called murder in any law on the books, you know.” He frowned in brief, pensive reflection. “Or, at least I don’t think it is. ‘Less they changed it recently nearabouts. Anyway, it’s mitigating or some such shite.”

Buffy rolled her eyes at him. “You’re just trying to make me feel better…”

“Well, yeah…”

“But I can’t. What was it that Xander said the other day about Spiderman?”

“Oh, Christ…”

“No, seriously. This was the only thing he and Jonathan have ever said that made sense. What was it? ‘With great power comes great responsibility’…”

“That’s it. I definitely need to shag you rotten if you’re gonna start taking pointers from sodding superhero shite on how to navigate bein’ the Slayer…”

Buffy sighed wearily and gave him a light shove toward the cemetery gates. They passed through, him heading for the driver’s side door while she rounded the ass end of the DeSoto to get in her side. “You do know that ‘shag you rotten’ doesn’t make it sound remotely attractive, right?” 

Spike didn’t reply until she was inside with him. Once she was seated, though, he grinned challengingly at her as he turned the car over. “‘Under the soft translucent… linen… the ridges around your nipples… harden at the thought of my… tongue.’”

“Is this a poem?”

He put the car in gear, grinning. “‘You—lying inverted like the letter ‘c’—arch yourself deliberately…wanting the warm press of my…lips…’”

“This is an unfair advantage,” she protested, feeling mildly assaulted. The arousal of twenty minutes ago came roaring back with reinforcements. 

He turned the car off of the side-road toward Forty-Third. “…‘It’s wet to coat the skin… that is… bristling, burning, breaking into sweats of desire…’”

“This is porn.”

He rolled his tongue, eyes front and peering through his driving slit like a man with a plan. “…‘Sweet juices of imagination.’” And his gaze flickered hotly over to meet hers. “‘But in fact, I haven’t even… touched… you.’” He smirked evilly. “‘At least, not yet.’”

She was breathing way too hard, considering that was true. “Who the  _ hell _ was that?”

“‘Desire’, by Sudeep Sen. Seductive, innit?”

_ “That _ one, you’d better do again in bed.”

“With my tongue buried in your sweet quim, is it?”

“Drive faster.”

His low, throaty chuckles were their music all the way back to Restfield.

***

They were in The Magic Cabinet a few evenings later with Wil and Tara when it happened. They were really only there to pick up Dawn, who had snuck off after school to try to watch the magicks circle do some casting or other at Giles’ apartment, and ended up disrupting everything. Willow and Tara had rather diplomatically decided to take her with them to the downtown shop to refurbish the supplies that had been wasted in the attempt, while an irascible Giles had directed Jonathan to help him reset their circle and symbols or whatever. “Dawn, for goodness sake,” Buffy called as she stepped into the musty-smelling magicks store under the ringing bell, “why are you always in trouble?”

“Yeah,” Spike intoned behind her. “Ought to have your bloody ears, me. Draggin’ me into this place. I hate magicks. And this place stinks.”

“Oh, don’t be a grumpypants, Spike,” Willow spoke up cheerily with a little hand-wave. “She was just being curious.” She turned back to the empty counter, where she was clearly waiting for someone or something. Probably the proprietor, seemingly in the back looking for a specialty item or whatever.

Tara looked up as well, clearly surprised. “Does it really smell bad?” She did a little sniff of the air, lifting her nose and everything. “I think it smells… earthy.”

Dawn smiled irrepressibly, shining her hero-worship beacon on her new best friend. “Like… patchouli and mugwort and wet incense.”

“Exactly. Very wholesome.”

“Oh, hell. Buffy, they’re converting her. Any moment now she’ll be wearing a skirt made of straw and puttin’ shag rugs in her room…”

“I can still cast a hex on you, you know,” Willow answered, less flippantly.

Spike smirked and curled his tongue at them. “Ever tell you about the flower child I ate at Woodstock?”

“Ooookay,” Buffy cut in, and stalked away from her guy to snatch at her sister’s arm. “You. Big trouble. We don’t interrupt the witchy witch-ness. It makes the spells go kerflooey, and badness ensues. And  _ you _ ,” she finished, turning to glare at the vamp currently having a lazy faceoff with one of said witches, “we don’t joke about eating people in… Well. Just don’t. And don’t tick off witches who are already having a bad day…”

Dawn tugged her arm out of Buffy’s grip to eye Spike with interest. “Was the hippie high?”

“Oh, for God’s sake…”

“As a kite.”

“Oooh. Did eating them make  _ you _ high?”

“Spent a whole soddin’ day watchin’ my hand move. It was bloody fantastic.”

“You know, that’s actually really interesting,” Tara mused quietly. “I never thought of vampires as being able to get, you know, intoxicated…”

“Oh, we can, pet. It just takes the hell of a lot of work, as we don’t have blood flow an’ the like.” He smirked slightly. “Or at least, not without provocation. Got to half-replace the blood-volume with the stuff to get it to the brain. But if you take it from someone who’s already done the work for us of gettin’ the mixture right…”

“Oh. Well. I guess that makes sense…”

“This conversation is so not happening. Dawn!”

The shopkeeper chose that moment to reappear from the back of the store somewhere. “I don’t have anymore of the hellebore, unfortunately. I can put you on the list for the backorder. Next herb order comes in Saturday. Can I interest you in some belladonna in the meantime, or perhaps some…”

Willow sighed heavily and shot Tara an assessing glance. Tara made a ‘not so much’ face. “No, I guess we can just wait…”

“See,” Buffy told her sister grimly, “now they can’t do the spell till next week or something.”

“Okay, look. I said I was  _ sorry _ , alright? What do you want me to do? Crawl around on my belly and  _ beg _ forgiveness?”

“No, of course not, Dawn,” Tara interrupted, wide-eyed at their fight.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Buffy snapped, embarrassed now at her sister’s teenaged dramatics. “Just… c’mon.” God, Dawn made her tired.

And now, of course, Spike was radiating disapproval from behind her, because as usual in such situations, he probably thought he was being too hard on ‘the Niblet’, or that she was handling her wrong or something. /But you give her too much slack. And Mom’s just too tired to deal with her right now, so someone has to stay on her case, the way she’s acting up, or she’s gonna end up in a gang or something!/

Dawn crossed her arms, the picture of rebellion, and set her heels in. Buffy immediately felt herself on the verge of explosion, ready to throw down an ultimatum.

Spike exhaled loudly, and stepped between them. “Alright, Niblet. Why don’t we just go for a walk or summat, yeah? Scream at the trees, or kick something, and you can tell us what’s brassing you off, so we can figure out how to fix it.”

Like he’d waved a wand, Dawn vibrated briefly, and then her shoulders relaxed, hesitating, then… “I can’t talk about it to  _ her _ .” Eyes darting to Buffy, like she was queen bitch or something. “She’ll just get mad.”

/Okay, wow. Like I don’t understand life, or…/ 

Spike’s shoulders actually managed to  _ tense in her direction _ , just daring her to snap back. 

/Oh,  _ fine _ . Let her have the last word./ She supposed if she was still not-quite-fifteen, she’d be all teed off at everything all the time too, and sure everything was all about her, and… whatever. “Dawn, I do want to hear about your life.” /Gah, this is so hard. What do you  _ want _ from me?/ “And I’m sorry I sound so mad. I’m mostly just worried about you. You could’ve been hurt by the backlash when the spell blew up.” 

Spike’s head twitched in the tiniest of up-and-down nods, approval now radiating from him as he relaxed infinitesimally. Which should piss her off, but, well… taking her cues from him when it came to handling other people’s emotions was part of the reason she wanted him around, right? /I can concede that./ And, Buffy supposed that in the long run it hadn’t costed her too much to say what she had said. 

Rolling her eyes, Dawn shrugged as if she didn’t care. But she did drop her arms. “Fine. Let’s just get out of here. I’ll see you later, Tara, Willow.”

“See you, Dawnie.”

“See you, Dawn.” Tara moved to give their youthful rule-breaker a quick hug. “It’s okay, you know. We can do some other spell this time. It’s no big deal. You were just curious. But Buffy’s right; we just want you to be safe and not get hurt.”

Dawn melted a little. “I get it. I’m sorry I messed it up.”

“It’s okay,” Willow chimed in, reinforcing her sweetheart. “We’ll figure it out, Dawnie.”

“Okay. Bye.” A little bent-elbow wave, and Dawn was trailing her escort toward the door. 

Near the exit, Buffy was arrested by a little stand of brightly-colored, laminated astrological placards. She fingered one, half turned away, ready to dismiss it. Dawn paused with her, picked up the hot pink Gemini card to scan it with interest. “Oh, that is so me.”

Spike made a contemptuous noise and leaned against the door, arms crossed.

Buffy shook her head. “I dunno. These things always seemed a little off to me,” she murmured, brushing the Capricorn one. “I mean, some of it fits how I work in the day-to-day, but it never fit how I do, like, Slaying, or a lot of my friendships… and it kind of fits my relationships sometimes, but not always…”

Tara’s head popped up again from where she and Willow were perusing the drawers full of loose herbs. “Well, I’d have to do your chart, but you always struck me as a Cap Aries rising, the way you take the lead in everything. No idea about your Moon…” She tilted her head at Spike, as if analyzing him. “It would be really interesting to do a vampire’s chart, with the two birthdays; to see how they influence each other.”

“Oooh, I never thought of that,” Willow exclaimed, jerking up from her herb-perusal with interest. “What a neat idea! Spike always seemed very Sag to me, but sometimes when he’s all snuggly with Buffy he acts like the most complete Cancer I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“Exactly what I was thinking…”

“Bollocks, the load of it,” Spike interrupted, eyes skyward in clear disdain.

“His birthdays are in June and November,” Buffy put in helpfully.

“Oooh, we were right!” Willow announced, bouncing.

“What does that mean?” Dawn asked, looking confused.

“It doesn’t mean anything, Bit,” Spike answered, clearly annoyed. “It’s all a great load of rubbish.”

“Shows how much you know. I’ve done at least three spells using astrology that have been way accurate. I bet if we did a reveal spell using one of your…”

“Touch me with your magicks and I’ll bite you,” Spike answered mildly, and tapped out a cigarette. 

“No smoking,” the shopkeeper called nervously from behind the register. “I, uh, don’t care if a vampire comes in as long as you’re, you know… peaceable… But no smoking.”

/So, I guess no fooling the local magick-shop-guy?/

Rolling his eyes, Spike shoved the filter between his lips and gave the room at large a truculent glare. “I’m no one’s show-pony.”

“Okay, someone’s testy today,” Buffy muttered, and grabbed his arm this time. “Sorry; I think he’s on his vampire period or something. We’ll get out of here and…”

Spike beetled his brows at her. “I’m not testy, Slayer, I’m sodding hungry.”

Thrown, Buffy blinked at him. “Wh… But, you…”

Tugging his arm free, he rubbed his chest, very deliberately, through his shirt, lips clamped hard around his unlit cigarette. “Been doin’ a lot of healing. Ran through all my provender. Need to go stock up.”

“Oh.” Buffy felt very abruptly incredibly stupid. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“Isn’t Wednesday yet,” he answered flatly, and pulled the cigarette away to seat it between his fingers. “No run at the hospital for two more days. Parlors are all out. One problem with keeping everyone on their best behavior is less bodies in town, and more customers out back. Less supply and more demand.” He shrugged philosophically, tension singing in his frame. “Might have to stoop to butcher’s blood, and I don’t bloody want to. And it brasses me off.”

/Oh, wow./ Buffy wondered why the hell she hadn’t recognized it since yesterday; the shining edge of violence in his frame, the building frustration, the way he’d scarfed down that rare burger like it was gold… And the way, she now realized, she had felt oddly hungry herself whenever she had been near him; and oh-so-on-edge.

He was depleted, had been for three days since that asshole Riley had essentially staked him. And because of their link, it was a feeling she shared. An edgy, panicked feeling that was the beginnings of vampire starvation. He was healing slowly, from the inside out. Her blood had given him a very nice head start, but it had been a near-fatal wound, and would take a lot more than that to fix. 

/And if you were your old self—if you weren’t with me—you would have fixed it already. You would have gone hunting, and you’d be fine. This wouldn’t be a problem./ But out of loyalty to her, and to their relationship, he hadn’t. Instead he was just standing around suffering, aware that the solution to his pain and hunger was available, everywhere.

He had to be beginning to resent that, at least subconsciously. 

Which meant she needed to find a way to fix it, before this got any worse. Because they both knew that even if he did stoop to animal blood, it wouldn’t do the job; or at least, not at any great speed. Buffy had had a serious object lesson in that truth last fall. It would take weeks to heal him that way, and just piss him off worse in the long run. /No./ “Hey. I don’t know why you didn’t say anything. I guess… maybe I should’ve realized, and I’m sorry I didn’t. But we’ll… figure something out, okay?”

He softened a little. “No, I… Hell, Buffy; I’m sorry I didn’t speak up. I was afraid if I did you’d think I was weakening or summat, so I thought if I just waited it out…”

/Wait, what?/ “And what, got weaker and hungrier till you popped? How does that even make  _ sense?” _ she demanded, abruptly incensed. “And do you think I want you that  _ mad _ at me?”

That earned her his incredulous face. “Mad? You  _ are _ mad! Sack of hammers if you think I’d ever be upset with  _ you _ over this, Buffy! I  _ chose _ it! It’s not  _ on _ you! What the hell makes you think I’d put it on you?”

Dawn was staring from one to the other of them like she was at a volleyball game. It made Buffy anxious. “Okay, but I’m the one asking you to…”

“To hell with this!” Spike interrupted, cutting a wide swath sideways with his hand, and abruptly vamped out. 

Dawn jumped away with a surprised ‘eep!’ as if amazed that their debate had gotten to this point in the middle of a downtown store. Which, to be fair, so was Buffy, if in a distant, hazy way. But that was one level. On another, it made complete sense. Spike was half out of his mind with hunger and pain kept carefully under wraps for too long. God knew she had seen this before with him. Heck, it was where they had started. The only difference was… she shared it with him now; felt it with him, augmented everything he felt, reflecting it back to him like an echo-chamber to make him even more anxious than he was already. 

And, it affected her thinking so that she had almost as little self-control right now as he had. /But I have a little more./ “Lose the bumpies,” she ordered calmly, and to show there were no hard feelings, caught his hand, soothed with a little run of her thumb along the back of his wrist.

He struggled with it. It was a command, after all. “Tryin’, pet,” he whispered, clearly startled at his own lack of control. 

She moved up close, touched his forehead with her free fingers. “It’s okay. We’ll figure out how to fix it.”

He shook his head, voice husky and taut. “Best step out. Too many humans in here.”

The store owner made a strangled sound and ducked to cower behind the counter. Willow murmured something that sounded like the beginnings of a spell. Tara, though, surprisingly, merely whispered, “Humans…” in a wondering tone, which was weird, but Buffy had no room to spare to ponder everyone’s reactions. 

“Okay, if that’s what you need. Not that there won’t be people outside, either, and I think your self-control is better than you seem to think it is…”

He shot her a withering glance under Neander-vamp brows. “Not gonna bite anyone, pet. Just don’t wanna stand about with my guts burning, smellin’ everyone.”

/Oh. Well, fair enough./

“Let’s go, Buffy,” Dawn urged, sounding pained for Spike’s sake. 

“Yeah. We’ll go maybe find some blood at that one place over in Goleta, on the other side of the college; Sweet Home…”

The door crashed open behind them. There was a flurry of pale hair and dark clothes. Someone or something struck Spike broadside, hitting him square in the shoulder hard enough to knock him off-kilter, and in process banging Buffy away so that she staggered hard against the rack of astrology leaflets. The entire rack collapsed, laminated materials slithering to the ground. 

Fighting to regain her footing, Buffy missed badly, stepped on a pile of baby blue pamphlets marked ‘Taurus: the Hedonist’, and damn near went down in an undignified heap. It pissed her off, and she came up swinging at the mass of black limbs that was Spike and his co-combatant. No way in hell he was on his own with this, weakened and hungry and… 

She had no time to sort out one set of black-clad limbs from another before the dimly-lit room was rent with a tiny nova. There was a sharp report; some kind of  _ snap-sizzle _ sound. Spike snarled; a terrifyingly primitive noise that threatened swift and ugly death, and Buffy was briefly blinded by a bright, crisp, blue-white shock as it traveled across the room at inhuman speeds, leaving behind an odd, negative afterimage; two dark bodies in galvanic poses, one holding some sort of tube-like weapon and one leaning far off to one side and away while the bolt or whatever sizzled between them. 

Time stood still for a moment, then snapped back to the present with an odd, whistling sighing sound, and with the resonance of sharp cries from Willow and Tara as they leapt aside, out of the arc of the odd, out-of-place lightning. Dawn cried out as well, though she wasn’t in the thing’s path, and dove behind some display or another, thank god. Buffy swung around, ready to grab the interloper; to divest him of his weapon… but he was already grappling with an incensed Spike. 

She caught a flash of bared fang, of flickering fluorescent light glinting off of blond hair, a glimpse of a recognizable profile. A fist swung. Spike snarled again. And then Riley Finn was on the ground, yelling something about civilians… and Spike, starving, beyond pissed off, and thus lost to sanity, reared back with fangs out to take a possibly fatal bite out of the demented soldier’s throat.

Acting on instinct, Buffy kicked her guy off the downed man—no time for commands, much less reasoned arguments about laying off one of his former abusers—and took his place on the jerk’s chest. No way this could continue. 

Straddling Riley while Spike sprawled to one side, shaking his head and looking confused, Buffy pinned the soldier’s arms with her knees. At which point, and none too gently, she yanked the whatever-it-was from his numbing grip to toss it aside… and punched him in the face, almost hard enough to knock him out. “What the hell is  _ wrong _ with you?” she demanded, incensed. “Seriously? Are you  _ dense?” _

Riley’s head lolled, half-conscious. He looked… He looked sick; pale, too sweaty, weirdly drawn, and with dark circles under his eyes. Said eyes burned with some bizarre, fanatic light that quite honestly terrified her. “Civilians,” he hissed. “Everywhere. And you…” he spat... and then his eyes rolled up in his head, and he passed out.

/Anticlimactic, much?/ “Well, okay, fine,” Buffy sighed, and relaxed a little to sit back. “Talk about cheating.” Turning a little on the creep’s chest, she glanced around the shambles of the room. “Everyone okay?”

Slowly, her posse emerged from their various holts. “Yeah,” Wil called. “We’re okay, I think. Tara?”

“S…sure. I guess. W…who was th…that?”

“Dawn?”

“Here.” Popping up from behind a fallen table, her gangling sister carefully stepped around some crunching remains of broken crystal. “Uh, Buffy, what’s going on?”

Buffy sighed and turned to her guy. “Spike? You okay? Did you… tear anything open or anything?”

Right arm flopped over a bent knee, Spike exhaled and jerked his head in the negative. He’d managed to shake the game face in the interim, but he was still breathing heavily in clear and labored emotional reaction. “Sorry about it, pet,” he grated, and his expression told her he expected them to have a pretty serious problem over his other very emotional reaction.

Honestly, Buffy didn’t have the time right now. And besides; it wasn’t like she could blame him. Aside from the fact that this was one of his tormentors from last year, the guy had only just shot him; damn near dusted him while he was at it. Put that together with near-starvation and the resultant edginess, and it was a wonder he hadn’t torn into the prick immediately. “Don’t. It’s not an issue right now.”

A brief, tense nod, which… oh. He’d take that to mean there  _ would _ be an issue later, and dammit, would she ever be able to word in a way that he wouldn’t interpret as… 

/Later. We’ll work on it later./ 

“Buffy,” Willow broke the silence, “is that… Riley Finn?”

Pushing herself off the currently-somnolent asshat, Buffy nodded and considered giving the unconscious man a brief kick in his side. “Yeah. He’s been hanging around. A few days ago he shot Spike very close to the heart…”

Dawn hissed like a teakettle. “He  _ what?”  _ she demanded, and promptly went into attack-teen mode, complete with finger-claws.

Buffy caught her around the waist before she could pounce. “Don’t. He missed. We’ve got this.”

“But…”

“Just back  _ off _ , Dawn.”

“But he…”

“Niblet,” Spike cautioned.

Making a face, Dawn immediately sagged and whirled to stalk back to her station by Wil and Tara, and dammit, sometimes it was infuriating the way she would obey Spike and not her own sister. 

Swinging briefly away from the irritating tableau, Buffy yanked out her phone. “I should call the local base, see if they can… I dunno. Grab him or something. File a complaint…”

“Buffy.” Spike’s quiet tones were a warning. “Somethin’ you should know.”

/Oh, man./ She turned back, phone in hand. “What? He still smell funny, or…”

He shook his head from where he lay, still sprawled on the floor. “No. That’s maybe part of the problem, though. Tosser smells mostly human. But his ticker’s gone all wonky. Sounds like he’s about to have a bloody heart attack. And he smells anemic.” A brief frown. “And a bit like vamps.”

Buffy opened her mouth to counter that the jerk had probably been having some target practice around town without a hunting license, but if he was shooting, why would he smell like vamps, and be  _ anemic?  _ And, vamps, plural? That was a little… off, wasn’t it? “What…”

Spike lifted his chin to point at the torpid soldier. “I’d check his arms, pet.”

/Buh?/ But Spike never suggested anything without having a damn good reason, so Buffy approached Riley’s crumpled form and rolled up one dark, ribbed sleeve over a pale, clammy arm… to reveal what looked like track-marks all up the inside, from wrist to inner elbow. Only these track-marks were in pairs. 

There were at least three bites on this arm alone… and they were all only a few days old.

Shocked and appalled, Buffy turned to roll up the other sleeve, and… wow. Just wow. The other arm bore similar attentions. Two bites there. But no bruising, no signs of force or anything. /You’ve been bitten  _ five _ times in a few days? How are you even still up and  _ walking?  _ And how did you get bitten so many times and not die? What vamp bites a guy without draining him? I mean, except my guy, who I know for a fact would definitely drain you if he lost it enough to bite you, so…/

Buffy lifted her eyes to Spike’s, confused as hell. “Wh…”

Spike shook his head. “Tell you later, love. Seen it before, though.”

/You’ve seen…  _ this? _ /

“We’ve another problem, as well.”

“Oh, great. What now?”

A little half-shrug of his left shoulder. “Room’s missin’ one heartbeat, and your roll-call didn’t pick up a civvie. Think maybe Soldier-Boy’s great taser there might’ve done for our overgrown shop-boy.”

Her brain was overwhelmed. That was her only excuse for how long it took her to work through that one. Normally her brain could translate Spikeisms with relative ease these days, after nearly a year’s constant association, but for some reason this one eluded her for a second. Which meant that this time, Willow got there first. “Oh no! Mr. Bogarty!” And she was darting for the counter, leaning far over. “Oh, Goddess!” And her hand flew to cover her mouth.

/Oh. Oh crap./ “Is he…”

“No heartbeat’s usually a fair indication, love.”

/Shit, shit…/ 

Dawn turned to Buffy, eyes wide. “Now what?” she demanded.

All eyes turned to her, the Slayer. 

/Oh, because I always have to have the answers or come up with the plan./ 

Le sigh. Sometimes being the leader really, really sucked.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Some people... when it's their time, it's just their time, one way or the other. And, well... it serves the plot. We want the future Magic Box to be able to change hand either way, and we don't have Big Bad Harmony. Not-so-bad Riley will do as well. And he serves a number of purposes in this story, in which I think he'll be much more useful than he was in the canon S5, when he just hung around being pointless and then tied our girl in knots and left.   
  
Also, how about that Sudeep Sen? Man's poems could make anyone sweat.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, let's see how we manage Riley's idjit arse, and Spike's little problem, and... stuff. Introduce a couple of OCs, springboard some future storylines...

“Well, first I guess we need to call the cops for poor Mr. Bogarty over there, and then we need to get Riley out of here. Take him to the military base, maybe, and dump him off for those guys to deal with, since he’s about to have a heart attack or whatever…”

“Uh…” Dawn interrupted, “not to be all, logic girl, because you probably won’t listen to me anyway, but won’t they wonder who killed him if you cart off the murderer? Like, won’t they think you’re hiding something or whatever? I mean, this isn’t a dead demon, right? It’s a dead human guy. Won’t they, I dunno, prosecute?”

Buffy honestly hadn’t thought of that, she was so used to just dealing with the immediate now of post-fight cleanup. But dammit, Dawn was right. Usually the victims weren’t killed by other humans, so she could leave it up to the police to come up with whatever story they wanted to about what happened. /This time, though, if I do that, I guess I’m, like, obstructing justice, and that’s an actual charge, right?/

Scary.

Except… “Okay,” she allowed, flustered, “but he’ll die if we don’t get him medical treatment. Shouldn’t we take him to the hospital, at least, and tell the cops he was involved and where he is? Or…” Man, this human-on-human stuff was sticky. Give her a nice demon-involved disaster any day. They were so much more straightforward. 

“For what it’s worth, pet, he doesn’t appear to be dyin’ right at the mo’, if you wanna call the bobbies first an’ see what they say. Then maybe you can call the MPs to come pick up their wayward puppy after we’ve established our innocence an’ all that rot.”

And how ironic was it that a vampire was actually worrying about establishing his innocence with the police? /Except he probably isn’t, so much as he’s concerned about what I think./ “Okay, I guess. But… could you, I dunno, keep listening in to his pulse and let me know if it gets worse or whatever?” It was a lot to ask, probably, considering how hungry he was, but it was all she had to go on.

“For all I couldn’t care if the sod kicks off, sure. Will do that for you, love.”

/You really are a keeper. Even when you drive me bonkers./ Lifting her phone, Buffy dialed the number for the local PD. With how many unfortunate events she’d witnessed, she knew it by heart. /They’re probably tired of getting ‘anonymous’ calls from me by now. Except this one won’t be anonymous./ “Hey, Wil; can you and Tara take Dawn home?” she asked, hand hovering over the mic as she waited through the rings. “She doesn’t need to be here for th…”

‘Sunnydale Police Department, how can I help you?’

“Hi. I need to report… well, an assault that kind of became a murder. Or, does that count as manslaughter, if they didn’t mean to do it, and someone just got caught in the crossfire?” 

“We can take her,” Willow mouthed, nodding dramatically. Tara joined her in the gesture. Dawn looked put out at being summarily relegated to a non-witness, but no way was Buffy going to let her be interrogated by the cops for this.

‘Ma’am, where are you?’

“Uh, you know that… that store where they sell herbs and whatever? Uncle Bob’s Cabinet, down off of Maple Court? I was in there getting a gift for a friend, and this guy came in and attacked my boyfriend, and he had this… taser gun thing, and I think he must’ve accidentally shot the guy who owns the shop, because he’s dead.”

The cop’s voice took on a much more tense cast. ‘I’m dispatching an officer right now, and I’ll also be sending some paramedics. Please stay on the scene…’

“Of course. We’ll be waiting. Do you, um, need anything else from me before they get here?” She covered the phone’s mic. “Get her out of here.”

‘No, ma’am, I believe…’

Dawn looked mutinous. There was a brief, fulminating battle of wills, held largely via glares and posturing since Buffy couldn’t speak up about it with the police on the line. 

A low, pointed growl from Spike put an end to the silent debate as if it had been sliced through with a hot knife. “Bit…”

‘...And they will arrive shortly…’

All of Dawn’s fight left her with a whoosh, as if her strings had been cut. “Man,” she whined in a low whisper, “I miss out on everything cool.” But she let herself be led out of the room between Wil and Tara. 

Buffy snapped the phone closed with a quick thank you; apparently just in time. As her sister passed, she eyed the pasty form of the downed soldier with morbid interest. “Jerk,” she whispered, and gave him a spiteful little kick in the side.

“Dawn!”

Innocent eyes shot up to meet Buffy’s, batting like mad. “What? I didn’t do anything!”

Spike started to chuckle, fast and low. Which, of course, helped nothing, since Dawn only took it as incentive. 

Buffy should punch him. She  _ would _ punch him, after this. “You’re an idiot,” she informed him flatly as the door closed with a little ring of the overhead bell. “You encourage bad behavior… and… stuff.”

Spike leveled her with an even gaze. “Uhuh. Tell me what’s really bugging you, love.”

Hand clenching hard around her cheap flip-phone, Buffy exhaled hard in defeat. It was lowering to admit it, but it needed to come out, or it would end up coming between them. It was a resentment, and Mom said never to let resentments fester. “It’s just… really annoying, how she’ll do anything you tell her to practically without you saying anything, but she’ll go out of her way to fight me on literally everything.”

“Oh, love. That’s because I’m not her big sis. And the other’s because you are. You’re too bloody alike, you two.”

She blinked at him, floored at his accusation. “We’re  _ what?” _

His lips curved in a lazy smile. “Know you can’t see it—and neither can she, point of fact—but it’s true for all that. Else I wouldn’t be able to work her same as I can you.”

“You’re nuts. And also, ego, much?”

“Tell yourself what you like, love.”

He was crazy. Dawn was nothing like her. And also… /You so don’t work me, you asshole!/

“Gonna try to prove me wrong now, aren’t you?”

“Okay, you know what…” She was definitely going to punch him; just as soon as the cops were gone and they had Riley out of here, and…

Spike made a reluctant face and pushed himself to his feet in a quick, graceful move that would normally have made Buffy’s mouth water, if she wasn’t so damned distracted and ticked off, and... “Don’t want to leave you alone with this, pet, but ‘spect I best push off before that lot get here.”

Buffy stared at him in new and sudden shock. “Wait, what? You  _ have _ to stay, you’re a material witness!”

Her words earned her a long, faintly amused stare, as if she’d said something wholly ludicrous. “Slayer, I have no legal identity. I don’t exist to be a material witness to a sodding thing.”

“Oh. Right.” Feeling like an idiot, Buffy lowered her head to her hand, pressed her closed phone hard to her forehead. “Duh. And I just told that desk officer that he attacked my boyfriend…”

“Oh. Fuck. You did at that, didn’t you.” Spike actually cast his eyes around the room as if searching for a spare boyfriend she could use for a few hours until the interview was over. “Well… shit.” 

“And, also, you promised to keep listening to make sure his heart wouldn’t stop or something till they get here.” Buffy felt as if she might just panic if this idiot died on her while she was alone here waiting for the cops. Not that she particularly cared about him, per se, but if someone died when she could have saved him—died because of a decision she made not to get him immediate medical attention—she just didn’t think she could live with that. Obviously Spike’s being around to listen in to his pulse wasn’t keeping him from kicking the bucket or anything, but for some reason she found it comforting to know what was happening; like having a heart monitor on the guy till help could arrive.

Spike’s eyes narrowed at her. “Don’t much care if the tosser buys the farm, Buffy,” he pointed out flatly. “Waste of blood, yeah?” He wet his lips. “Already enough of that goin’ begging in this room as it is. Need to be out of here.”

“Wh…” /Oh./ The shopkeeper guy was just… laying there, ‘going to waste’, and he was having a tough time with that concept when every funeral parlor in Sunnydale was currently empty due to his own white-hatted efforts, and him in need of fresh blood. For which she couldn’t blame him, and really, she was probably being very cruel keeping him in here, should at least send him outside to smoke till the cops arrived, or…

“Least once the deader gets looked over, if they tag an’ bag him fast enough an’ I can figure which Home they send him to, I might be able to get first crack at the leavings since I know he’s going, before every other sod jumps ahead of me on the list. Something ought to come with rank in this bloody town…” 

He sounded so damned bitter, and… /And, I could lose him if I’m not fair here. And the blood’s just going to be drained out of the guy anyway, before he’s embalmed. And by then it’ll be old blood, and Spike’ll be fighting over it with a bunch of other vamps in town who are only trying to supplement because of the new rules, but aren’t living the way he is, for me. And am I insane right now?/ Because a year ago she would never have even considered letting him do what amounted to desecration of the dead just to fill his belly… but that was before. Before she realized that he wasn’t to blame for what he was; when she had thought he was a monster simply for trying to survive, even if he might have done it in the most humane way possible. Before she had come to realize, and to believe, that he deserved to exist. 

That was what it came down to; whether she believed that he deserved sustenance more than a dead guy, a dead  _ human _ , deserved to remain wholly untouched from the moment of his demise to the time his family saw him dunked under the earth. 

Her values had shifted a pretty huge amount in the last not-quite year. They could probably stand to shift another half-step. Because, really… the dead man didn’t need the blood anymore, and it wasn’t like it was the first time a body might turn up in Sunnydale with bite-marks on it. /And can’t they tell if someone’s exsanguinated post-mortem? Like, that it’s not the cause of death?/ 

Anyway, it was a nice solution to their current problem, and she should just do it before she had time to think too much. “Spike…” Deep breath. “I need to call those military guys over at the base. They’ll probably get here a little after the cops, but at least they’ll be on their way. Can you stay in here with the body until I get back in, and make sure Riley doesn’t wake up and get away?”

His head jerked up, and he stared at her in clear amazement. His mien darkened for a moment, as if he thought she was playing a trick on him. “Buffy, why the bloody hell would you ask that of me? You know what I’m goin’ through right now; d’you wanna torment me?”

“No,” she answered softly. “I want to close my eyes, walk out of that door, and pretend I don’t know that you’re being taken care of.” She held his gaze very firmly for a few brief seconds till she saw it; shocked recognition flickering in his gaze. Then, turning on her heel, she headed for the exit. “I’ll probably be done in like five minutes,” she warned over her shoulder. “I don’t wanna see anything when I get back.”

“Buffy…”

“Just shut up.” And she was out, the bell tinkling over her head. 

Outside, against the blank wall between door and tiny, shaded alcove, Buffy eyed the lowering light and huffed out the air in her lungs. Her hands were shaking. Everything felt unreal. 

/No point asking yourself what you’ve done. You already know. It’s done. So just open the phone, make the call, try not to… stay connected./ She didn’t want to feel it when he… /Wait. What’s the number, anyway? It’s not like you know it. Military-Bases-R-Us?/

A couple minutes later she was outside of the bagel place on the other side of the little used book store, having briefly borrowed their phone book. A couple of rings put her through to some very official recorded menu. Several button-pushes later and she was on with a bored-sounding young guy named Private Ricks in the Office of Military Police. “This, um, guy is here in town, at this shop called Uncle Bob’s Magic Cabinet…” Inside of which store, at her back, at this very moment, was a vampire who was already feeling much better, despite the fact that she was trying very hard right now to feel absolutely nothing from him. “I know, dumb name.” The tension in her voice was not faked, rose in an inverse tandem with the relief, the satiation she could feel from the other side of her joint organism. /Shit./ 

“Anyway, I know he’s in the Army; and just now he attacked my boyfriend and me and then collapsed like he was sick. He’s acting crazy, like he’s on drugs… Oh. What’s his name? Riley Finn. He was in, I dunno, ROTC or something at the college before I…” She cut off when the private very suddenly stopped sounding bored and rattled out some speed-talk to someone else in the room. “Oh. Are you, um, looking for him or something?” 

‘Ma’am, is Finn currently conscious? Dangerous?’

/Wow. Talk about a name that gets attention./ “Uh, he’s knocked out. But he’s pretty dangerous. He had some kind of electrical gun thing, and he accidentally shot the guy who owns the magic shop. I think he killed him. The cops are on their way…” Speak of the devil. A patrol car bearing a pair of Sunnydale’s Finest was coming around the corner at that very moment. “Why, is he AWOL or something?” Sometimes it was best to pretend to be an airhead. It kept suspicions to a minimum.

‘Ma’am, we don’t say AWOL anymore. Please, stay away from Captain Finn, and advise the police to do the same. We’re sending military police to take custody of him. They’re already en route. Thank you for your call.’ The connection went dead. Which was good timing, since the cops were pulling up just then.

It probably would’ve looked better if Buffy had waited for them outside, clutching her phone like a nervous citizen afraid of the dead body and the unconscious attacker-guy inside. But, well… she needed to warn Spike in case he wasn’t… finished, so she gave the cops a tiny wave in welcome, attempting as she did so to look grateful for their presence, and ducked back into the store. 

Spike looked up at her entry, as announced by the bell. He was back by Riley’s side, looking much more calm and collected than he had when she’d stepped out. There was not a trace of blood on his lips or clothes as he crouched next to his erstwhile attacker, actually holding a wrist as if counting the man’s pulse. But then, he had always been a fairly fastidious eater. She remembered seeing him once with a fair amount of blood on his lower lip, which happened when… /Well, when it’s pumping. Stop thinking./ But he always cleaned up quick, like a cat; and he never had that ‘blood everywhere for the sake of throwing it all over the place’ thing going on like when some younger vamps did it. 

His eyes touched on hers briefly as she moved to cross the floor; seeking, she knew, for regrets. She fought not to look away. She didn’t regret, per se. It was… tough, but she’d deal. It wasn’t, after all, like anyone had been hurt. It was more of a philosophical hang-up; a social mores thing, which was part of the problem, she knew. He didn’t care about social mores, didn’t see why he should suffer or starve for their sake. He had left all of that behind nearly a century and a quarter ago when he’d been dramatically freed from the choke-chain of Victorian life. He had no use for any of it, paid lip-service to the whole damn thing only for her sake. Which meant… /I’m the only reason, in the end, he’ll ever suffer or go hungry. And if that’s what lays between us…/

It had to be for a better reason than because she was uncomfortable over the disposition of a dead guy who no longer gave a damn, and hadn’t been in any way harmed. It had to be for the sake of a life. Or how could she call herself his? How could she call him hers, and remotely consider herself a decent holder of his wellbeing, his heart, his fealty; all that he tendered her? /If I can’t get past something like this, how can I consider myself worthy of this kind of love? He’d dust for me without even thinking about it. I better  _ damn _ well be ready to be uncomfortable for him./

Holding his gaze, she mustered up a smile. It was shaky and a little lopsided, but it was there.

Seeing the offering, he practically exploded, like some kind of awed tropical flower blooming; a riot of bright, beautiful color and light. She never thought she had seen eyes so blue, seen him look so radiant. “Oh, Christ, love; oh Buffy. You’re one hell of a woman. You’re the One, you.”

Tears sprang into her eyes, in spite of herself. “I…” 

The bell tinkled again, making her jump. She kind of wanted to rip it off the wall.

“Miss Summers, right?” the first cop spoke up as she entered. She was a tallish blonde, about 5’8 with her hair done up in a tight ponytail under her cap. After a brief pause to take in the scene, she strode into the room with a businesslike air that probably, Buffy assumed, came from having played in the boys’ club for years and made it work for her. Behind her another cop appeared and was framed in the doorway; a shorter, stockier figure in standard-issue broad-shouldered, dark-faced, crew-cutted Sunnydale PD glory. “C’mon, Ramon, get a move on.”

“Alright, alright,” Ramon answered, sounding aggrieved. “Just wanted to take in the scene, you know?” and huh. Did they put the Latino guy with the female cop as partners on purpose, or what?

The second cop entered, the door dinging shut. Buffy looked up and automatically held out her hand as the female cop approached. “Hi. Sorry about all this. I don’t even… This is crazy.”

The cop eyed her for a moment with something behind her brown eyes; something uncomfortably assessing, maybe knowing, before she gave a quick jerk of her head that might have been acceptance and held out her hand in response. Her handshake was tight, hard, and as businesslike as she was. “Alright. What happened here?”

Buffy had the uncomfortable feeling the woman had left off an unspoken ‘this time’. /Ugh. I’m, like, famous, aren’t I?/

Scary thought. “Um, so this guy…” She carefully nudged Riley with the toe of her smudged and abraded, fawn faux-suede over-knee boot, “just came barreling in here to attack us. He had that weird gun-thing…” She pointed at the tubular barrel of the zap-gun deal, safely kicked aside in the interim to lie up against the store counter. “He must’ve shot it in the scuffle, because after he basically passed out mid-wrestling match, we found out the clerk guy was dead. Then we called you.” /Why do I keep buying cute shoes?/ It was an addiction that would end up sending her to hell way before anything she did with her vampire. Not one pair of shoes she owned had the power to survive her life; and clearly most of her cute, strappy ones never even made it out of the closet anymore, what with slaying and school and… /We need to go out. Somewhere not Willy’s. Maybe I can convince Spike to take me dancing at the Bronze. If it’s an excuse to use the shoes… It so worked out for me last time. He never even let me take the things off./ “Wait, huh?”

“I said, do you know your attacker?” The female cop was eyeing her patiently. The male one was already halfway over to duck behind the counter and check on Uncle Bob. 

“He’s for sure dead, Waller.” Tugging his radio from his belt, the other officer lifted it to his mouth and muttered into the static, “Cancel EMS to Bob’s Magic Cabinet. Is the coroner en route yet?”

The blonde cop nodded. “Thanks, Cortez.” And her expectant eye returned to capture Buffy’s gaze.

“Uh, he used to work at the college. Last year. He was a TA at one of my classes. We went on a date. He was in the ROTC or the Army or something. National Guard, I dunno. Anyway, he got… called away on duty or something and vanished. And then all the sudden he’s here again, attacking me and my boyfriend, and…” She waved her hand vaguely at the chaotic scene around them. She didn’t have to put on the befuddled face. “I mean, it was  _ one _ date, a  _ year _ ago. I don’t get it.”

Spike grunted, sounding amused. 

The cop—Waller?—turned her gaze to him, eyes filled with interested surmise. “He attacked you.” It wasn’t a question. 

What followed was the most extraordinary transformation Buffy had ever seen in her life. Spike rolled his shoulders forward, tucked his hands into his jean pockets around the edges of his duster, ducked his head as if he was about to blink down at the floor, and shrugged a little. “Dunno why,” he answered softly, and woah. There was that quiet, Giles-ish accent from before; the unassuming, safe-sounding one. “Bloke just came out of nowhere and jumped on me.” 

He actually managed to sound  _ diffident _ . /Holy crap, are you channeling William? Was this what William was like?/ 

No wonder the line of his body under the duster was pained, the feeling of him on their bond stifled. Just, wow. No one in their right mind would ever believe this guy was a dangerous vampire.

“Well,” the cop answered, relaxing slightly. “People act weird when they’re jealous. I’ve seen crazier things, believe me. Maybe he felt inadequate because, you know, big Army guy, and here you are, Mr. English Accent…”

Spike shrugged again, hands still in his pockets, and remained silent. 

It was giving Buffy a massive wiggins. Was this what they meant in the books when they said ‘self-effacing’? Because William the Bloody and ‘self-effacing’ should never, ever go together. Not in any universe. 

“Hm. So…” Turning away from them for a moment, the cop knelt to touch Riley’s unconscious neck. “He just passed out?”

Buffy shook it off to dive back into the narrative she was spinning for the good old Sunnydale PD. “Uh, yeah. It was nuts. He was all, like, sweating and pale and talking crazy, and then, just, boom. I, um, checked his pulse after like they taught us in health class, and it felt all weak and weird. He still looks pale, and um…” /What the hell./ “He has all those, what do you call ‘em? All up and down the inside of his arms? The holes; like he’s on drugs. I noticed when I was checking his pulse…”

Frowning, the cop stripped one sleeve up… and cursed loudly as she dropped Riley’s arm and backed away from the still form. “Cortez,” she addressed her partner, who had abandoned the dead shopkeeper to wander curiously nearer, “call for backup.” Her hand had dropped to her gun.

/Oh, man./ 

Cortez fumbled again for the radio at his belt. Time to head this off, before it became a bigger thing than it needed to be. “What, you think he’s on, whatsitcalled? PCP? Can you shoot that up?”

To Buffy’s surprise and amazement, the officer shot her a furious look. “Miss Summers, if you’re trying to protect your cute English boyfriend, that’s great, but don’t play dumb with me. This is an emergency. Send him out or something, but dammit, I don’t wanna die here.” She’d already flipped open the catch on her service pistol. 

The corner of Spike’s mouth twitched, a rumble of amusement sounding between them. He was finding all of this very funny. Ugh. But his expression read as, ‘Your call, love. I’ll back you.’

/Fine./ With a heavy sigh, Buffy turned to what was clearly a veteran Sunnydale cop and dropped the act. “He’s not what you think,” she told the officer calmly. “You can put away your gun. He’s been bitten, but he’s not going to… change.” 

Waller flung her one brief, disbelieving look, and backed another step away from Riley. “How do you know for sure? He has what? Three, four…”

“Five,” Buffy answered. “But trust me. You can get bit and not die, if you make friends with the right… people.”

The cop froze, turned to her very slowly. “What, are you saying this is a… A kink?” she demanded slowly.

“Can be,” Spike answered for her, dropping his own act. 

Both cops swung on him in surprise at his new, clipped intonation. With a shrug that clearly said ‘in for a penny’, he straightened out of his theatrical slouch, pulled out a cigarette from his breast pocket and calmly broke California’s statewide smoking ban to light up. 

The familiar scent of burning tobacco filled the shop, the specific, sweet aroma of the Morleys almost as calming to Buffy by now as it was to Spike. Probably that was a fringe-benefit of sharing his internal responses to the nicotine or whatever; unwanted, but unavoidable. “You know that’s illegal,” she reminded him with a faint smile for his shenanigans.

He threw her a lazy, pointed look and held up two fingers, the lit cigarette snugged cheerily between them. 

He looked so much better confident than diffident. /I love you./

“Well, technically this isn’t an enclosed workplace,” Cortez stuttered, still confused at the abrupt metamorphosis. “I mean, it is, but you could argue…”

“Shut up, Ramon,” Waller interrupted, and watched Spike warily. “So, this guy…” she asked with a gesture toward Riley. Her words were directed at Buffy, but she kept an eye on the unknown quantity that was Spike while she spoke.

“Is, or was, in the Army, likes getting nibbled on for fun, apparently…” /Which, what even, and  _ how? _ Inquiring minds want to know!/ “And thinks he needs to attack me and my guy over and over again this week because he’s lost his damn mind? Yeah. That about sums it up. That poor dude over there just got caught in the crossfire.”

Waller tore her gaze away from Spike to look over toward the counter where the dead clerk lay hidden behind glass cases. “Right. Sure. Anything else I need to know?” She sounded clipped and irritated at the foregoing charade.

/Well, since you seem to know who I am, or at least suspect, and you definitely know something about what goes on in this town, I might as well warn you./ “Uh, the clerk has a… An unexplained injury. They’ll find it when they do the autopsy or whatever. But it’s not, you know, the cause of death. So you can tell…” She frowned. “Which coroner is it? Mr. Nunes, or Ms. Metziger?” Yes, she knew the names of the town’s coroners. Occupational hazard.

Waller’s eyes narrowed at her. “Metziger’s on duty today. Tell her what?”

Buffy shrugged. “That her findings or whatever will back that. He was already dead before the… unexplained injury happened.”

“What the hell is going on here?” Cortez broke in, sounding aggrieved. “Why did you guys all start talking in freaking code?”

Buffy and Waller ignored his protests. “Then how did he get the… unexplained injury?” Waller demanded, harsh and uncompromising.

Buffy drew herself up. “I’d rather not answer that.”

Officer Waller turned to furious stone. “Okay, listen. I appreciate what you do around here. But I have paperwork. My life is hard enough in this town without having to put up with this kind of garbage.” She swung on Spike, glaring. “And what about you? Why is your girlfriend doing all the talking, Mr. Strong and Silent? Where’s your statement, if you’re the one who was attacked?”

Spike lowered his cigarette casually to his side. “Rather not go on record if you don’t mind. I’m… an illegal. Don’t have ID an’ the like.”

Cortez snorted massively from off to one side. “Look, bro. I don’t think you have to worry about  _ la migra,  _ ID or no. You’re white, man. You’re the whitest white. You’re freaking  _ British _ . No one’s gonna bother you.”

Spike never took his eyes off of Waller. “I don’t have a legal identity, here or in Jolly Old. Makes it tough to make a police report when someone jumps you if you don’t exist, yeah?”

Waller jerked as if she’d been subjected to Riley’s taser-gun, and she took one tiny step back. “Usually when someone jumps you,” she breathed then, “I bet they don’t live to tell it.”

Spike just shrugged.

The cop swung on Buffy, outrage and amazement lighting her eye, and was that for her letting Spike feed on the body, or for her having the temerity to screw a vamp? 

Either way, Buffy was so done with people eyeing her askance for her dating habits. And as to questioning the rest… “Look,” she pointed out flatly, “you know things’ve been quieter in the last year, right?”

The cop’s lips flattened to a thin, uncompromising line. “Yeah,” she bit off, as if freeing the syllable had cost her pain.

“Well, there’s a reason for that.” Crossing her arms, Buffy turned her gaze solidly on Spike. “I have help. Volunteer help on the inside.” 

Nodding genially, Spike lifted his cigarette and took another easy drag.

Turning back to the perturbed officer, Buffy shrugged with her arms still crossed. “And in order to keep that help, I have to treat that help fairly. I can’t… work in partnership with someone who breaks my rules… so when it comes down to it—to having that help crack under the pressure, or to bending those rules a little…” Waller blanched, winced as realization struck. Buffy didn’t let up. “…With something that’s gonna happen anyway, I bend. I give, where it’s otherwise going to waste. Because I need the help. Because in the grand scheme of things, it’s no harm no foul. And compared to what could happen instead…” She trailed off, and waited.

The cop fought with it. The struggle was visible, and monumental. Then her dark eyes flickered over to Spike’s. “You help her?” she demanded fiercely.

“Have to kill me to stop me,” Spike answered, flat and uncompromising. “An’ the only one can do that is her.”

Waller exhaled heavily and nodded, crossing her own arms. Looked down contemplatively at the floor. “I can see how… How you could make that decision then, I suppose.” The last was addressed to Buffy.

“Seriously, what the hell are you guys talking about?” Cortez was getting loudly frustrated at his lack of comprehension.

Waller lifted her eyes to meet those of her confused partner. “You’ve been on the job for, what, three months? About time you get your initiation.” A little shrug, an amused smile playing at the corners of her lips. “Would’ve happened a lot faster a year ago, but like the woman said, things’ve been quiet as hell around here lately, which…” With a look of decision about her she lifted her head and eyed Spike for a moment with the air of someone about to pick up a live rattlesnake for the first time. Then she stepped forward and held out her hand. 

Spike’s eyes jerked to the proffered hand, then back up. He didn’t take it. “Don’t thank me. I’m second in command around here.” He tilted his head in Buffy’s direction. “She’s the general.”

Rolling her eyes, Buffy smile slightly. /You’re such a dope. This chick’s fighting every instinct she has to be open-minded, and you’ve gotta play Big Bad because now even humans know you’re mine./ Sometimes he cracked her up. He was so utterly willingly on his leash, and yet, very occasionally he would stand up, grab it, shake it, bare his neck to show off the collar like it was a crown, and bite everyone around him for daring to look at it when it was visible for all to see, like it was this completely private thing. Which she got, but… /God, it’s not like you hide it./ He was such a huge dork. 

Waller had turned her gaze to Buffy’s, hand out again. “Never thought anyone could… I dunno. Broker that kind of deal with… them. That must’ve taken guts.” And clearly she thought that going to bed with a vampire was part of the arrangement… a part she considered to be possibly the bravest portion of the deal. “Not that I don’t think it comes with perks,” she went on, eyeing Spike briefly up and down with clear, if awed, admiration, “but…”

Buffy heard herself laugh out loud as she accepted what was now a much more heartfelt handshake. “Guts… had nothing to do with it.” She released the hand to nod at Spike. “Also, he’s being uncharacteristically humble. I couldn’t do it without help from within and a lot of 411. It’s a team effort.” And she fixed her guy with a pointed look. “Spike, will you please make nice and shake hands with the pretty police-lady?”

Spike removed his cigarette, threw her a glare leavened with a brief hint of gratitude that it wasn’t an order, and with a heavy, reluctant sigh, held out his hand. And did his usual ‘get back his own’ thing when he felt like he needed to be on higher ground. He flirted. It was a subtle thing; just a shift in position from reluctant to welcoming, a slight change in expression from truculent to ‘dangerously attractive’. But it was enough. Looking surprised, the cop took the hand. Shook it, breathing a little tremulously. 

She visibly shuddered at the touch of his room-temperature flesh… and froze briefly when Spike pinned her with his blue-eyed predator’s stare; the one that lured in the snacks with the promise of a ‘right good time’. 

/Oh my God, you’re such a… A  _ vampire! _ /

Officer Waller didn’t pull her hand away till Spike broke eye-contact. And she shivered when she did. “Uh. So…” She shook her head, as if fighting to clear it. “We’ll, uh, tell Metziger to overlook the… unexplained injury in the report…”

Spike’s nostrils flared, and he smirked in a self-satisfied way. Which meant one thing. He’d succeeded in turning the cop on. Asshole. 

Buffy stepped hard on his foot, and drove a discreet elbow into his ribs.

The smirk vanished behind a bland screen of superior aloofness.

“I swear to God, if someone doesn’t tell me what unexplained injury…”

Having reset herself in the interim, Waller ignored her partner’s protests. “She’s used to doing that anyway. And there’ve been so few lately…”

“We’re getting into winter,” Buffy answered blandly. “Less people falling on their barbecue forks now we’re out of picnic-in-the-park weather.”

Spike snorted again.

“Yeah. Right.”

“Huh?” 

“I’ll tell you in the car, Cortez.” Glittering dark eyes sized up the spot where the body lay. “Where…”

Spike lifted his boot to stub out his smoke on the sole. “Right arm, midway up.”

The cop took that info as stolidly as she could manage it. “Okay.” Her eyes swiveled back to take in the still-unconscious Riley. “EMS was supposed to be on their way, but they got diverted to another call when we told ‘em our friend here was dead. But this guy looks pretty bad. We should tell ‘em to come back…”

“Oh. Um…” Buffy did a little  _ mea culpa _ shrug. “The military’s on their way for him. They should be here any…”

The door jangled discordantly as it burst open. Framed in the evening light were two guys in khaki helmets with blue bands that said ‘MP’ in white lettering, and behind them, two other guys in short, flat camo caps carrying what looked like briefcases, except the briefcases were decorated with red crosses.

The cavalry had arrived.

***

“That’s him alright. That’s Captain Finn. Call it in.”

“On it.”

“Man, he’s a mess; look at him. He’s been UA for four days; he’s gonna need steroids, maybe antibiotics…”

Off to one side, the two cops were whispering urgently to one another, clearly taken aback by the military’s imperative response to Riley Finn.

“We gotta get an IV in him, get him back to medical before his heart goes.”

The lead MP guy shouldered in between the crouching medics, looking stoic and unmoved. His gun remained trained on Riley’s somnolent body, as if he might explode into consciousness and start raging around the room at any moment. “We gotta keep him under guard, is what we need to do.” His beady, alert eyes flickered over to Buffy. “Ma’am, you’re the one who called?”

“I am. He attacked my boyfriend and me, twice…”

Broad-shouldered body, uniform, every part of him, assessing her with judgment in his gaze. “And you didn’t press charges?”

/Dammit. No, because I’m me, and because it was about us, and a world you’re not in, and.../ “I thought we had it handled. I guess not.” Buffy found herself frowning at the immobile body, surrounded now by urgent soldiers. “I guess this means… that guy’s on us.” She felt awful about it now, as the belated recognition hit her full-force; if she had called these guys on Riley when he’d first attacked Spike, come up with a decent cover story then, Mr. Bogarty might not be dead now. “I guess I should’ve called you guys a few days ago.”

Spike’s hand closed around her upper arm. Absolution. She knew what he would say. She’d had a lot of other things on her mind, among them making sure he was in one piece and un-dusty. 

Still.

“No, ma’am. We should’ve located him. He’s been a danger for a while now. He’s…” 

“He’s off his meds,” one of the medics muttered as they swarmed over Riley’s form. He dragged up one sleeve to check Riley’s pulse. It was the one with the fang-marks in his wrist. “Oh, shit, what the hell has this guy been doing?”

“It doesn’t matter right now,” the other medic muttered. “Just get his pulse. I’m on BP.” The lead medical dude was hard at work wrapping a cuff around the less-damaged arm, lips moving as if he were reciting something to himself. “Okay, we’ve got narrow pulse pressure. BP’s one-oh-two over eighty-eight, pulse is thready…”

“We’ve got fifty-two here,” his second put in, looking grim. “Think we’re flirting with tachy?” 

Head medic guy frowned and glanced up at the spare MP. “You. Make yourself useful, hand me that AED.”

Looking severely out of his element, the guy with the gun nudged one of the briefcases open with his boot, pushed it toward medic number two. “Here.” And he backed swiftly away to hold his gun on Riley again.

“Get the AED ready, Carter, and run that IV line…”

Carter looked uncertain. “What about the meds? We wanna give him the meds now, Corporal?”

“No. We can’t risk it. He’s been off of ‘em for almost four days, and he’s got too low a blood-volume. I don’t know what the hell he’s been doing; self-medicating somehow.” Turning over one bared arm, the sleeve now pushed up high as the cuff was stripped away, the lead medic cursed in disgust. “Look at this shit; see those track-marks? Who the hell knows what’s in his system? Shit could kill him right now, even if he needs it. Leave it to the docs to straighten out his system once we get a workup. Full panel…”

“Keep the information tight, Corporal…” the head MP guy snapped, eyes darting around the room.

“Right.” The two medics busied themselves with setting the IV line, lips buttoned.

/Okay, this is just getting too interesting./ “Meds?” Buffy queried, trying again for sweet, blonde, and cutely stupid.

The MP didn’t fall for it. “Never mind ma’am.”

To her surprise, the quiet-till-now cops decided to join her in her info-seeking quest. “If he’s UA,” the rookie pointed out, looking interested, “and he’s on some kind of meds he wasn’t taking, and he did  _ this _ ...” A broad, encompassing hand-wave to indicate the wreckage in the room, the body behind the counter. “I’m thinkin’ a dishonorable’s in whitebread’s future.” There was a note of mild satisfaction in his voice as he said it.

“Keep it to yourself, Cortez.”

“No comment,” the MP put in without looking at either of them.

“Ooyah,” the rookie responded with a funny little smile.

Cortez was ex-military, Buffy assumed. 

There was a short silence, then, arms crossed, Waller leaned over to whisper loudly in her partner’s ear. “Manslaughter at the least, though, and a definite court martial, whatever the meds are for.” Her eyes glanced over at Buffy’s. “Combat stress won’t excuse the death of a civilian while he’s running around out here with some kind of military grade, experimental weapon…”

Another one. Huh. Who knew there were so many ex-soldiers in the Sunnydale PD?

The MPs didn’t comment; just stood there looking all tight-lipped. 

“Not combat stress,” Spike muttered in Buffy’s ear. The low rumble of his voice, as always, made every hair on her neck and arms stand up, made her body sway toward him of its own volition. “Thinkin’ whatever they did to ‘em downstairs messed ‘em up. Probably they’ve been on meds ever since to keep ‘em in workin’ order. If he’s been AWOL and missin’ ‘em, it might explain why he went off his trolley like this and turned himself into Soldier Boy Van Helsing with a side of whore.”

Startled at that last, Buffy blinked and leaned in to clarify. “What, now?”

“Show you in a bit, love,” he promised. His whisper took on a taut note that said whatever it was, she was probably not going to like it much.

/Great./ 

Eventually they got Riley stable, wrapped him up, carted him out. The coroner came in just as the soldiers were leaving; a vaguely-familiar person in a zip-up cardigan with short, iron-gray hair and dark, plastic-rimmed glasses with tiny rhinestones, sharp, glittering green eyes framed by weary, jaded-looking squint-lines. “Hey. What’ve we got?”

“C’mon,” Cortez muttered, and escorted her over to where the body lay hidden.

Waller nodded at Buffy and Spike to get out. “Go ahead, Miss Summers, Mr…”

“Spike,” Buffy supplied blandly.

The cop pursed her lips but didn’t comment. “We know where to find you if we have further questions, but it looks like this one’s pretty clear-cut. And the Army’s got their guy, so we’ll have to go through them if we wanna pursue it.” A little, philosophical shrug. “Which never amounts to anything from a civilian standpoint, so this’ll go nowhere. Meantime…” Her eyes focused sharply on Buffy’s. “You stay safe out there, alright Miss Summers?” There was actual, genuine concern in them, which Buffy found warming. “And… good to meet you, ah, Mr. Spike. Not something I ever thought I’d say, but…”

Spike managed a genial nod, which put together with allowing the handshake... Well. He was in an understandably good mood, what with the sated. Buffy made a mental note to keep him well-fed in future if it meant good relations with the locals.

They made their escape, stepped from the lengthening shadows of evening under the awnings to the DeSoto. Spike didn’t even need to yank his coat over his head by now. “Ugh,” Buffy muttered, rounding the curb to the still-vaguely-sunny side of the car. “That took forever.”

“Day’s not over yet, love.” Turning the car on, Spike scanned her as if assessing her resilience level. “Got something to show you.”

“Yeah,” she answered on a breath. “I figured.”

He nodded. “Off we go, then.”

***

Their destination appeared to be a rundown house near the warehouse district, between there and the docks and about a mile from the Fish Tank. “Okay...?” It was seedy, falling apart, and covered in graffiti, but it wasn’t exactly her idea of the kind of place the Slayer needed to look into. Maybe a gang haunt, or…

“More’n meets the eye, pet. C’mon.”

The place was silent as the grave as they moved up the steps. Buffy thought she caught faint motion through the boarded up windows as they passed, and maybe she heard a moan of pleasure. /What the hell? Is this some kind of, like, pimp’s house, or…/

Spike stepped up ahead of her in that way he had where he turned his body sideways; pulled the door open, held it for her to look in. She maneuvered to glance past him… and was literally assaulted by a blast of recognition, so strong it almost knocked her over.

There were a metric fuckton of vamps in here. But if this was a nest, it wasn’t standard, because by the feel of it, every one of them was in game face right now. 

What kind of a nest was it where every vamp in the place was in a feeding frenzy? This was like… like sharks or something, when you chummed the water.

She pushed in, prickling and anxious and sure she needed to stake everything inside… and halted. Because contrary to the feel of the place on her skin, the air inside wasn’t a thrumming mass of death and destruction. 

For one thing, none of the vamps even looked up at her entry. Or, okay, one did, and looked confused by the intrusion of her vibe, but he didn’t look fighty. He actually looked a little drunk. Mostly the rest just looked either anxious, or lazy and sated. All of them were in game face, yes, sprawled out over ratty furniture, holey couches, broken chairs, ripped beanbags on the floor. It stank like old blood and unwashed clothes, and there was trash everywhere like this was one of those drug dens you saw on TV, but… 

But these sharks weren’t frenzied. They were lazily circling around a meal already taken, or… 

“Spike, what’s this about?”

He shook his head once, sharply, to cut off her questions. Nudged her inside and followed, pulling the door closed with a  _ creak-clunk _ as it swung to on damaged hinges. 

A couple of the vamps in the room tensed when they recognized Spike. He waved his hand dismissively, a king in his court, and they relaxed. One of them narrowed amber eyes at Buffy at his side, putting the pieces together. Buffy studiously ignored her, fighting to control her instincts; to wait to see what Spike was trying to show her about this vast nest. 

Passing the anxious watchers downstairs, they headed for a broken-spindled stairway with a rail she would never touch for any money, past torn wallpaper and up into a ghetto hallway with a broken, dangling lightbulb and some trashed furniture, more graffiti, and a lot of doorways filled with what sounded like more suppressed moaning. “Seriously, is this like, a whorehouse?” Were people having sex with vamps in here, or…

“Something like,” Spike answered, and nodded. “Have a look in any door, Slayer, but don’t bother to interrupt. They wouldn’t like it any more than you would if someone did it to you.”

/Buh?/ But, trusting her guy, she stalked forward on her toes to nudge one door a little wider ajar. And saw them, inside. A woman, lying on her back with her hand seated firmly at her crotch, flicking urgently with her fingers, while… While a girl vamp in serious game face crouched at her arm, feasting at the inside of her elbow.

They were both moaning. Both getting off on it.

/Oh my God./

Swinging away, face on fire, Buffy closed her eyes and breathed hard, fighting for equilibrium as the perfect storm of colliding realizations exploded in her mind and threatened to drown her in the undertow. 

There were so many rooms up here. And she knew what they were doing; what all of them were doing up here was… They were all…

Suddenly she felt like something incredibly precious had been cheapened. This… This should be special! It should be between… And here they were, all of them, up here just…

And any one of them could slip up! Go too far, and then it was what? Hide the body, make a fledge…

It hit her like a ton of bricks, all the sudden, why Spike was showing her this. This, then, is where Riley had gone. Five times in less than four days. /Just… why? Holy crap;  _ why?  _ Why take that risk?/

“You see, pet?”

She did see. She saw Riley Finn behind every one of these doorways, cheapening the beautiful thing she had with Spike, risking his life to prove… whatever he had been trying to prove. And yes, she got the draw, the addiction, the need and the danger, but she still kind of really wanted to burn this place down right now with everyone in it, and how the  _ hell _ hadn’t she known this fucking place existed before now? “You  _ knew _ ,” she heard herself whisper. “You knew it was here this whole time. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Let’s talk outside.”

She knew that stoic voice. He wouldn’t budge. So she went. Back through the ugly gauntlet; down the stairs, past all the vamps down in the living room waiting for their next fix, past the broken furniture and the banal nastiness of it all to exit the building, looking neither to the left nor to the right. “Okay,” she gritted, eyes front and staring over the debris of the weedy yard. “Tell me.”

With a sigh, Spike pulled out a cigarette and leaned on the rickety, canted rail of the sagging porch. “It’s an economy, love. The defective ones, or the lazy gits as can’t or won’t hunt right, they come here. Vamps as’ve been damaged in some way—broken fang, bad leg, bad eyes, can’t see right to hunt, yeah?—this is what they stoop to.”

Buffy was admittedly a little nonplussed at that. It had honestly never occurred to her that vamps could come out defective, or be damaged badly enough that they couldn’t hunt. But then, she supposed that Spike had had a church fall on him and had been wheelchair-bound for who knew how long. If Drusilla hadn’t kept him fed—and from hints she’d gotten since, not all that well—he wouldn’t have made it. Which, god. For a warrior, a hunter like him, how incredibly lowering, to be stuck taking what was brought by a half-mad, forgetful ‘mummy’.  _ “Dru brought me a puppy once. A soddin’  _ puppy _. She was telling me I was her lapdog; there, with Angelus lookin’ on. Christ, I wanted to off m’self.” _

Without a nest to care for them, the lone-wolves of the vamp-world must have to make do the best they could, she supposed. Still… “Is that why you… Why you let them… Because you get it?”

Spike stubbed out his cigarette, looking bitter and abruptly pissed. “Fuck that, Buffy. Enough real vamps about. It’s bloody survival of the fittest, yeah? Think I care about these tossers? Wanted Dru to off me when I was in this boat; wouldn’t come here if I was dyin’ of starvation. D’ya know what…” His jaw tightened in that way that said he was fighting something massive. “When I had the chip in my head, for a while I thought maybe I might… Might have to…”

/Oh. Oh God./ “Spike,” she heard herself whisper, and covered his hand with hers. 

He pulled sharply away from anything that remotely resembled pity, and she had never been more glad that she’d gotten that hideous thing removed from his brain. “Any road, it’s not about these tossers. Did I do away with every one of ‘em, the junkies would just go to real hunters for a fix, yeah?” Burning eyes turned to hers, his head tilted sideways and fiercely pointed in the night. “Get themselves bloody well offed, wouldn’t they? You wouldn’t like that. Here, I can stop ‘em makin’ fledges, keep ‘em under control. It’s all in one place, innit? Very civilized.” 

/Oh. Right./ Buffy forced out a nod, accepting. This was part of his Master’s decision-making. “And you didn’t tell me because you thought I wouldn’t get it. You thought I’d… overrule you, burn the place down, and then…”

“They’d just set up somewhere else, Slayer. And next time, I might not know where it was to keep an eye on it. Supply and demand.”

“Okay,” she breathed, allowing he was probably right about that much. “I guess I just don’t get… I mean I get what’s in it for the vamps… and the… the donors, but it seems so…” She fought down her gorge. “What keeps them from getting too… personal?” /They’re doing  _ all _ of it, and somehow it’s so… transactional, and I just don’t…/

“The money’s what keeps it impersonal, pet.”

Buffy reared back at that, horrified. “The… The vamps pay the donors to…”

Spike cut her off with a loud guffaw. “Love, the humans pay the vamps for the privilege.”

She stared at him, mouth hanging open in shock. “The…”

“Keeps the vamps in rent, in smokes, in drink… Whatever else they want or need and can’t get otherwise.” At her continued incredulity, “Told you, the tossers in there are junkies. They need it just as bad as the vamps need to eat. Maybe moreso.”

“But… But they’re both already getting… I don’t…” She couldn’t wrap her brain around this inversion of the wonted way of things. The vampires were the ones who needed the blood. Ergo, they should be the ones paying the humans for the privilege, not the other way around.

Spike lifted his brows at her. “They pay for the right to come in and not die. For the restraint they get while they get their kicks. And they pay well.”

“Oh God,” Buffy breathed, and then, arrested, felt something sick permeate her soul. “But that means the vamps are…”

“Whores,” Spike answered, turning away. His face twisted grimly, and he pushed away from the railing to head for the holey, swaying steps. “Yeah.”

/And you said you had to think about maybe stooping that low when you… When the chip…/

/Oh. My. God./

No wonder he’d rather have thrown himself at the feet of his mortal enemy, seeking clemency. Spike, the fighter she knew, would rather risk being staked outright by someone he hated than lower himself to prostitution to stay alive like a kicked dog. “I’m… I’m glad you came to me instead.”

“So’m I, Slayer.” A faint huff of amusement. “Least when you tie a bloke up, you do it proper.”

/Oh my God./

***

She shook her head as they passed through the dank alley, heading back toward the car. “I just don’t get it. I mean, I get them, but I don’t get Riley. Don’t get why he’d… do that. It almost killed him.”

Spike eyed her in the dark, looking amused. “Sometimes I despair of you, Slayer.”

“Is this another one of your, ‘You’re missing something completely obvious’ lectures?”

“Yes. Look. You dated the bloke, right? He thought he found his ‘perfect, normal girl’. Likely he fancied you for a long bloody time before he pricked up the courage to ask you out, which meant he might have thought himself head over heels for you by then…”

Buffy blinked, thrown. “We had  _ one _ date!”

“And you’re you.”

Okay, sometimes Spike was the absolute end. “Hello, bias.”

“Hush and let me tell you how it was. So you finally give the poor, slavering tosser his date. He thinks he’s making progress. He’s probably hearing wedding bells…”

“Oh for God’s sake…”

“Then you turn around, tell him you’re engaged, prance about with a vampire, and make it inordinately clear that you’re not only not the normal, sweet—if wildly quirky—girl he’d built you up in his mind to be…”

“Wildly quirky?”

“Shut it and listen. Instead you’re some sort of monster like the rest…”

“Alright, monster’s kind of a stretch.”

“In his mind?”

Okay, he had a point.

“Then he spends a bloody year lurkin’ about, spying on you…”

“Which is just nasty.”

“Given. But there it is.” Something darkened in his voice, and his shoulders tightened under the duster as he averted his eyes. “I understand it. I’d bloody do it, were I that gone on you and couldn’t touch you, Buffy; just tryin’ to understand why I was so soddin’ attracted, so obsessed with someone so wrong, so opposed to everything I was about…”

/Oh, wow./ What a thought. /You…  _ That’s _ why you understand him? Because if we never got together you think you’d have… stalked me?/

Except, when she thought about it not from the ‘ew OMG gross!’ human perspective, but from the demon-y, instinctive one... Spike was a hunter, first and foremost. Of  _ course _ he understood that. Because for him it wouldn’t have been stalking, but… assessing. Except not prey this time but a potential mate. Studying her habits. And falling harder, every second he did it.

After all, it was what he’d done with her from the start. He would just have kept on doing it while finally consciously aware of why, instead of lying to himself about his motivations like he used to before. And heck; it wasn’t even like that kind of thing was new for her. Angel had done it too. It was really just how vamps operated when they dug a girl.

/Though, given that, what was Riley Finn’s excuse?/

“So he hung about,” Spike went on grimly. “Watchin’ you doin’ the slayin’, and canoodling with yours truly. Everything he knew was a lie. He was attracted to a demon-girl. Was it you? Did you have him under some sort of spell? Was it what they did to him? The stuff they pumped into him? If it was, then why is he still attracted to you, totally against his will, when the shite they put in him is long gone?” 

/Oh./ “You think he was still…”

“Stop interruptin’. I’m on a bloody roll. Or is it…him? Is he just attracted to monsters?”

“Oh,” Buffy whispered it aloud this time, all too aware of exactly how that particular conundrum could play out in a person’s mind.

“Then he finds out not only are you sleeping with a monster, you’re letting one bite you. And all the sudden, there’s his answer; his way to find out, is it really him? Because the question’s been burning him up from the entrails out for a year, and he bloody well can’t live with it anymore. So he comes here. He gets bit, to once and for all see, is he attracted to monsters, or is it just you? Because one way or the other, he’ll finally know before he goes mad… or he’ll die.” Piercing eyes found her in the low light. “Either way, he’ll finally be free.”

Closing her own, Buffy let out a shaky breath. “You know, I think you should probably also teach a psychology class.”

“Bollocks.” The scoffing tone then altered to something pained, and her guy abruptly turned from armored, ‘give-no-fucks vamp’ to the sensitive person she knew always lay just underneath. “It’s that I could’ve  _ been _ him, did the chips fall a different way.” His eyes cut briskly away. “Had to ask meself once, briefly… was bein’ attracted to you ‘cause of that soddin’ thing they put in my head… or was it always there, and I only noticed it because you were near, and I couldn’t bloody get away?”

/Oh, wow./ 

The car was a little ways ahead, beyond the mouth of the alley. Buffy leaned against a pallet tilted against the wall and shoved her fingertips into what passed for pockets in her jeans, let out a little breath. “You know, the common denominator in both of these little stories is me. The girl who confused the crap out of your demon because you got all attracted to the wrong woman; a mostly-human girl, a Slayer. And him, a human getting all attracted to a demon-girl, a Slayer…”

Spike eyed her warily. “Where you goin’ with this, pet?”

She made a face at him for being obtuse. “So are you saying it’s my fault he did this?”

Disgust touched her guy’s voice, made his rough, North London vowels go even more clipped with impatience. “Bollocks to that too. The tosser chose what he chose. You didn’t ask him to get obsessed with you, make you represent his own existential crisis; no more’n you asked to be the catalyst to whatever the bloody hell is happening to me. Not your fault. Like you said, you went on one bleedin’ date with him…”

Buffy lifted a pointed brow in her vamp’s direction, watching his hair gleam in the low moonlight, the faint glimmers of incandescence from over there on the grimy street-front beyond the mouth of the alley. “At which point he heard wedding bells?”

“Yeah, well. ‘Love is like a child, that longs for everything it can come by’. But, considering that it’s you, it’s not like I can blame the poor sod.”

“Sure.” /Except that when you heard wedding bells with me right off the bat, it was because of a spell.../

Spike scoffed at her dismissal. “Don’t look at me like that, Buffy. I wasn’t gonna let you get out of my sight from the moment you stuck with me in that soddin’ motel and washed my damn jeans for me, whatever I told myself. Would’ve hung about the rest of my bleedin’ unlife, loyal as a Labrador and happy enough just to have gotten friendship and respect from you, much less this. Mating you…” He trailed off, inhaled, and looked away, his expression illegible in the gloom.

/Oh, God.../ He wasn’t lying. And, she could see it now. How it might have gone. Because that was so  _ Spike. _ “I would never have let… I could never have…”

His eyes came back to hers, indigo in the night and gleaming with certitude. Then they broke away, sardonic. “Have to give him credit for breaking the rules, though. In my day, did a teaching assistant date a student, he’d’ve been flogged and cast out on his ear, penniless.”

Taken aback, Buffy frowned thoughtfully. “What, you think it’s bad juju for a TA to date a… Oh.” It had never occurred to her to question that whole thing before, but she supposed it would be kind of a conflict of interest. For one thing, favoritism grading papers and stuff. “Huh. Well, he wasn’t really directly a UCS employee, right? Like, there was some weird contract through the government. Maybe he never read the fine print. He always struck me as Mr. Follow the Rules.”

Spike shrugged. “Or, he wanted you so badly that he just bloody didn’t care.”

/Well, ew./ 

They subsided into silence. Eventually Buffy shoved herself away from the pallet with her elbows, turned toward the end of the alley and their ride. And was caught by one cool vampire hand. “Slayer?”

She would know that hesitant tone anywhere, and turned back to wait for it.

He wasn’t quite meeting her eyes anymore. “Know that you must be disappointed, that I almost bit the lad. I wasn’t in my right mind when I…”

Something flared in her; something that didn’t want to be discussing this. /Oh, for God’s sake./ “Look, dammit. I get it. It was a fight. He tried to kill you twice in one week. He was part of a group that tortured you. He attacked you when you were starved and in pain. I understand. That’s why I’m there; to stop you.” She tried for nonchalant. /Shrug it off. Do we even have to do this? Right  _ now? _ / “Anyway, I’m just glad you could fight back. Protect yourself, against him. If…” It caught in her throat. “If he got another good shot in because you were weak or hurting, and he… If you…”

Out of nowhere his hands were on her shoulders, and she was pressed up hard against the grody wall of the alley. And very suddenly she had a face full of furious, intense, thoroughly-irate vampire. “He wouldn’t have. I would’ve killed him, Buffy. You know it. Drained him dry, and reveled in it, if you weren’t there. And that’s the thing. You won’t always be there. So what do we do, you and I, when it happens? Because sometime, someday… it will.”

/No. Don’t throw this question at me./ It was the one she had carefully avoided all this time. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. He shouldn’t ask this of her. 

She shook her head and cut her eyes away, unable, in that moment, to answer. 

With a sharp jerk of a nod he let her go, backed off… and vanished down the alley. Away from the car. Away from her. 

Left behind, Buffy breathed against the dank wall, bereft.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
It can't all be smooth sailing.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Getting into some nice, meaty stuff here. (Thanks as always to wolf_shadoe for being awesome!!!)

“It’s not fair, dammit. It’s not fair that you even asked me that. It’s just not!” Stomping down the street, distraught and pissed off, Buffy punched boxes, slapped garbage out of the way, stabbed things with her sword. 

She hadn’t seen Spike since last night. She couldn’t find him anywhere. And how was it fair that he was staying away, making her crazy, making her feel guilty right now, when it wasn’t even her fault? /I am what I am, and you are what you are, and it’s not like either of us asked for this, right? So why do I have to have all the answers all the time? Why do I have to have ‘em when you put me on the spot like that? It’s not fair and it’s not right and you’re a being a dick!/ Because what he wanted her to say was ‘no matter what, I choose you’, and it wasn’t that easy. /Don’t you get that what I want to be able to say, if I can get away with it, is, please let me find some middle ground with you,  _ please _ , because if I can’t I don’t know if I can go on living? Because I love you and I’m bound to you and you’re everything I need and you’re my  _ partner _ and I don’t even think I know how to  _ do _ this without you now, and what the hell are you  _ doing _ , anyway, just running off and vanishing on me because I don’t have a black-and-white answer? You asshole! You’re the one who  _ taught _ me nothing’s black and white in the first stupid place!/

At a loss, she closed her eyes and cast out around her, feeling for him… and came up empty, again. Because, yes, she had tried it more than once in the last twenty hours. Not that it had stopped her from trying again… and again; feeling around that featureless spot in her mind or her body or… whatever, no matter how often she came up blank. 

Literally blank; like she’d struck a black-painted glass wall. Which was even more unfair, because, fine. /Just because you’ve been doing this for a hundred-plus years, and you know how to lock someone else out of your vampy mojo when you wanna go screw around doing something you don’t want someone else to know about who has a blood-leash with you, fine. But you’re being  _ such _ a bastard, because this  _ isn’t _ the same! This is two-way, and I’m freaking out, and… And when you do this you don’t know that I’m…/ 

She was going to lose it if she couldn’t feel him soon, find him, because she didn’t know if he was okay, or if he’d gotten drunk and gotten into a fight with something that could really hurt him, or if he had left town, or what, and she had never realized how dependent she had gotten on feeling him till now. Their bond had only been a two-way street for a very short time, but the sudden loss of it had highlighted the fact that, on some deep, subconscious level, she had actually been able to feel him since she had first fed him her blood and claimed him as hers back when the Hellions were taking over Sunnydale last winter, if only in the way of knowing, in a vague sense, which direction he was in in reference to her own position and generally that he was alright. 

Being stripped of that sense, now, after all this time, was liable to induce some kind of claim-y panic attack, somewhere in her deeply-buried ‘you know men leave, right?’ trauma-spot. Not that Spike would or even  _ could _ , but…

/Then where the hell  _ is _ he?/ her panicked mind hit back, and of course she had no damn answer, which just contributed to the not-okayness of this whole entire thing. And was it bad that that was maybe, deep inside, part of why she had been okay with closing the claim, on some weird, kneejerk level--because it had meant she would get to keep him, no matter what, which, ugh--but now it was starting to look like maybe he could even get around even  _ that  _ if he was motivated enough, or if she pushed him too hard, because that was just Buffy all over; and if  _ Spike, _ of all people, could leave her, then…

/He  _ can’t. _ He won’t. He’d  _ never _ .../

But she was still coming up blank, and this was dumb and unfair and… and embarrassing, but she was going to have to admit defeat and beg for help. Go roust up the troops and recruit reinforcements. /I’m going to have to admit to my friends I can’t manage my vampire./ And that was literally the most galling thing imaginable, both as a woman and as a Slayer. She could already imagine the I-told-you-sos.

This was going to suck royal.

But it was still better than curling up in a corner in a tiny ball and crying, and maybe admitting to herself that she might have lost him?

Because if she had managed to lose  _ Spike, _ of all people, then she couldn’t keep  _ anyone. _

Ever.

As per usual at this time of day, with work over and nothing else going on, the Scoobs were assembled at Giles’ place, because poor Giles had no life of his own and was constantly being invaded, and man. He needed a girlfriend. Or, if Spike were to be believed, a boyfriend. Though, how the guy was going to get a life if he was constantly playing host to a bunch of barely-out-of-their-teens youths with magicks issues and problems with vampire-boyfriends, et cetera, was questionable. 

Maybe he needed a second, secret apartment?

/Probably he just needs to tell us all to leave him alone one night a week or something. Or, you know, probably two./ With her newfound recognition of adult things like ‘date night’ and the actual right to have time to oneself that did not involve ‘working’ dates, Buffy had begun to recognize that Giles, too, seldom got grownup time. Which was probably unfair. “Jeez, do you guys ever let the man have any time to himself?” Buffy fronted as she shoved her way in. “I mean, isn’t Tuesday the official Witches Club meeting? Because just so you guys know, this isn’t Tuesday.”

Giles glanced up from where he was hiding in his kitchen, probably trying to avoid the crush in his living room. “One might think they would realize that, mightn’t one,” he murmured dryly.

“But… this is the  _ spot,” _ Xander protested, clearly befuddled. “I mean, this and the Bronze, and it’s too early for the Bronze. They don’t even open the doors till seven.”

“Maybe we should come up with a new, non-Giles-apartment-having clubhouse,” Buffy pointed out. “You know, so Giles can get some play.”

Giles turned a sort of pale maroon.

Anya swung around to eye the Watcher with interest. “Are we interfering with your capacity to find orgasm friends, Giles? Because if so, that’s highly selfish of us and we should leave immediately.”

“I… That is to say… While Buffy is being quite…”

“You know, it just never occurred to me that Giles might, you know… date,” Wil pointed out, sounding surprised at herself. “I mean, he’s so…”

_ “Old,” _ Xander supplied, equally stunned.

“He really isn’t, though," Buffy pointed out, distracted, and waved a hand. "I mean, he’s Mom’s age, and Mom dates.  _ They _ even dated, briefly…”

“Buffy, please.” Her Watcher had progressed from maroon to purplish. “And anyway, that wasn’t a date so much as…”

“Sex under the influence of chocolate?” she put in sweetly, but with an evil edge that would make her missing asshole of a boyfriend very proud.

Everyone whirled to stare at Giles.

And, okay. Buffy’s frustration at Spike was a thing, but she shouldn’t be taking it out on her Watcher. “Never mind. I’m glad you’re all here for now, though, because Giles’ dating life isn’t the thing we need to worry about today. Mine is.”

They whirled back, albeit more slowly, because apparently the antics of Slayer-and-Vamp were a lot less juicy than the prospect of speculating over the Watcher’s nonexistent love life. 

Giles, though seized on the change of subject with relieved alacrity. “Oh? What’s the trouble, Buffy? Something happen with Spike?”

“Yeah. The jerk’s missing. Has been since last night.” /And let me just tell you how pissed off that makes me. Also, terrified and frantic, but I’m not gonna tell all of you that./

“Oh, man,” Xander moaned, and plopped himself down on the couch. “I need donuts for this.” He made a grab for the box. “Okay. I’m fortified. What happened?”

“Was it something to do with the whole Riley thing?” Will asked, sounding anxious.

“Yeah, was he upset because of the attack?” Tara put in, wide-eyed with concern.

/And, here we go./ “No. He was upset about what I said to him after. Or… more what I didn’t say.”

Giles rounded the bar from the kitchen to take his seat at the desk, eyes focused exclusively on her. “I take it you two had a row. What was the substance of the argument, then?”

/Dammit./ They were so gonna jump all over this. But she was not  _ even _ gonna feel like she was on trial while they did it, so she moved to take a seat herself. “He apologized for almost taking a bite out of Riley while they were fighting. I said I got it, and it was alright because I was there to stop him. Then… he asked me what happens next time, when I’m not there to stop him. And I… couldn’t answer him.” 

Predictably, it was Xander who first spoke up into the resultant silence. “Well, to be fair, Deadboy has a point, Buffy. I mean, he’s gonna slip sometime. It’s just playing the odds. The only thing holding him back is how he feels about you. I can’t blame him for wanting to know how you’re gonna react. Which, we all know what you have to do…”

Buffy’s jaw tightened. “Oh? And what is that, Xander?” Because she knew what Xander thought, knew his hard line. “See, I think it’s a little more complicated than that, and that’s why I’m mad. Because it’s not so simple. It’s not so black-and-white, and Spike’s the one who showed me that. That everything’s a gray area…”

Xander shot to his feet. “There’s where you’re wrong, Buffy! I know how you feel about him, but he’s a  _ vampire _ . This is why I was worried about this; for  _ your _ sake, whatever you might think! Because sooner or later, you’re gonna have to stake him, and what if you can’t? Because, vampire kill, vampire dust. The end!”

“No!” she snapped back, “that’s where _you’re_ wrong , Xander! And I know how  _ you _ feel about vampires, but this is different! Every time, it’s different! I don’t get how you think it’s different for a vampire than for a human, that we have all these exceptions when one of us does it—when we’re protecting ourselves, or a friend or a family member, or it’s an accident, or whatever, when even the law says a person can get off on a technicality—and yet in your mind, just because that person’s a vampire, all the sudden it’s open season!” 

Xander flinched back, looking confused. She pursued the point ruthlessly. “Don’t you think he should get the same whatever? Latitude or proviso or whatever as we do if, like… What if he killed someone ‘cause he was protecting me, or Dawn, or  _ you? _ What if he did it to protect himself, because that jerk Riley tried to stake him? Because he  _ did _ almost stake Spike; four nights ago! Nearly dusted him; and let me tell you something flat out, Xander; I damn near killed the jerk myself! Should I get the death sentence for that?” She was breathing hard, fighting for air… for her _life_. Because Spike was linked to her, and fighting for his right to live was all the same, now.

Xander stared at her in amazement… and then his face went blank and he sank slowly back down to the couch, looking thrown. “I guess I… never thought of it that way. It was just simple. Vampire kill, vampire die. The end.”

“Yeah,” Buffy answered flatly. “I hear that. And it’s dumb. Because this vampire doesn’t just kill people for no reason. And I can’t just make a blanket rule like that. Not with him; not with any of the demons around town. Not anymore. I have to look deeper.” She realized only then that she had balled up her fists so tight that her nails had dug bloody holes into her palms. “And I can’t  _ believe _ he asked me to give him a black-and-white answer last night. That he  _ did _ that to me, when he knows…”

“M…maybe that’s not… what he meant?” Tara put in quietly.

“Oh, that’s what he meant,” Buffy answered darkly. “And when I couldn’t give him an answer, all put on the spot like that, he just… left.” /You  _ bastard _ . You know what it means to me when someone leaves./

Giles had a hand up. “Let us all just hold on for a moment. I’ll admit that I’m not Spike’s greatest fan, but this… doesn’t sound remotely like something that he would do. I believe there has to be more to it, and we ought to reserve judgment until we’ve had a chance to talk to him…”

“Yeah?” Buffy sighed into her hands, defeated. “Fat chance of that, when he’s completely gone off the map. I can’t even feel him. He’s doing some kind of vampy reflecting thing to turn my claim on him back on myself so I can’t reach him or whatever. He probably figured out how to do it to Dru, or maybe Angel, years ago, so he could get some time alone, and now he’s using it against me like a complete jerk.” /And when did I start calling his ex ‘Dru’, like he does?/

“Fascinating. Do you think I could perhaps…”

Buffy shot a glare at her Watcher. “Later. When I’m not dying inside.”

“Right. Sorry. Ah, well, perhaps we could…”

“Maybe he’s over at Willy’s…”

Another pointed glare for Xander. “As if that wouldn’t be the first place I’d look.” And she should be nicer. It was, after all, a peace offering, and she was glad that Xander was trying, but, dammit, /I came here for  _ help _ , not stupidity!/

“Or the Fish Tank?” Xan tried next, gamely.

Buffy shoved down her frustration with an effort. “A bust,” she managed through her teeth. “Look. I’m not trying to be a bitch, seriously. It’s just… d’you think I’d come in here and admit this to you guys if I hadn’t already checked there?”

Xander let out a high-pitched noise that almost sounded like a titter. “Okay, fair.”

Wil exchanged a brief glance with Jonathan, caught Tara’s eye. “I know a spell. One that shows all the demons in town, on a map. Maybe if we…”

“Oh. Yeah. I know that one too,” Jonathan spoke up for the first time, and came to life to stand eagerly. He sounded glad for something to do. “We need tansy, and rue, and… Uh, Mr. Giles, I know you have a map around here somewhere…”

“Oh, yes, quite. Over there by the Nausiccus…”

“Okay.” Dodging around behind Buffy, the nervous boy started rooting through the top of the bookshelf for the folded-up piece of paper. 

“Uh, how can you find one specific vampire with a spell like that?” Buffy demanded, feeling the tiniest shred of hope bobbing to the surface of her growing despair.

“Probably with something of his,” Anya put in easily, as if she were only vaguely interested in the proceedings. “I’m sure you must have something. Goodness knows with the way you two carry on you probably have some of his hair on you. Or if necessary, we might be able to separate the components of your blood, though that might take a certain amount of side-spellwork…”

“Uh,” Tara broke in, “I actually have to go.” She sounded oddly jumpy out of nowhere. “You, um, can do this with Anya helping, right Wil? I just remembered I have this… This thing…”

Wil glanced up at her partner, looking startled. “You okay, baby?”

“Yeah, I just… R…remember, I have to go get that… That g…grimoire back to Becky over on campus. They really need it for tonight’s invocation in the Wash, and if I d…don’t get it to her in time they’ll get kicked out at nine when the d…drum circle takes over…”

“Oh. Right.” Willow frowned. “I don’t wanna miss the Invocation, but…” She glanced anxiously over at Buffy. 

Buffy bit the inside of her cheek. She wouldn’t beg.

“Oh, y…you should h…have plenty of time to make it,” Tara stammered. “You know it’s not till seven. It’s just, you know, they need the b…book first, to g…get ready. So I’ll go first, and m…meet you there. This shouldn’t take long.” She turned her eyes to Buffy, pleading and regretful. “I’m sorry, Buffy, and I know it’ll work. If it doesn’t, we’ll f…figure something out, okay? I’ll come back if not, and we’ll do a search or something.”

Buffy nodded her thanks. Tara was an odd girl; incredibly warm and genuine, but oddly nervous at the weirdest times. “Okay, thanks Tara.”

The Wicca girl made her escape, looking strangely pursued. 

“Okay, well, I guess you’re our fourth, Anya,” Wil put in, concerned gaze still on the door. 

“I wonder if I’ll show up on the map,” Anya put in as she grabbed up a leather bag of something and sat, cross-legged, at one side of the map Jonathan had laid out on an open segment of carpeting. “I’m obviously not a demon anymore, but it would be flattering if the spell still considered me to be an honorary one by some means. Perhaps my aura’s still demonic; do you think?” She sounded brightly hopeful.

“Ahn, if you had a demonic aura, it would mean you still had your demon soul, and whenever those jerks at the Council showed up they’d probably wanna capture you and study you.”

“Oh. Right. Well then. No aura for me. Let’s see if I don’t show up. Giles, c’mon. Don’t be a slowpoke.”

Wil glanced up at Buffy as she sprinkled something smelly around the edges of the map. Her voice was already doing that misty thing it did when she started to lose the thread of her concentration with the outside world, while she sank deeper and deeper into witchyness. “Did you have something to bring to the spell, Buffy, to offer in supplication and connection with the essence of the demon we wish to identify within the bounds of this locale?” And then she was back briefly, with a little shrug. “Which sounds kind of portentous and oogy. You’ll get it back. We just need to touch it and stuff. No big.”

/Not very reassuring, Wil./ Pulling in a deep breath, Buffy tugged the chain out of her blouse and over her head. She hadn’t taken it off in a long while. Her chest felt naked without the bobbing weight of it. “Here.”

Wil blinked a little as she regarded the slowly-swinging, silver object. “Is that…”

“It’ll work, right? I mean, he says it’s mine now, but he wore it for at least fifteen, twenty years, so…”

“Oh, yeah. It’ll work. But, um… take off the chain, okay? That’s yours in the way where it was never his.”

“Oh. Right.” Inserting her nails in the loop, Buffy maneuvered the clasp open, slipped the thin, silver chain out, and reluctantly passed the heavy silver ring into her friend’s hand. The skull motif gleamed fitfully in the lamplight, back in the open in the room where she had first been gifted with it. /If it helps me to find you now, you idiot, then that’s just poetic justice, right?/

/Doofus./

Willow held the ring out in between herself and the other members of the witch-brigade. Anya and Jonathan reached out to lay their hands on it, murmuring something about aspect and knowledge. Giles, moving to take his seat on the far side of the map, threw Buffy a slightly incredulous look before he moved to do the same.

/Don’t judge me. Just…  _ find _ him./

***

Buffy shoved the ring-necklace back over her head and turned for the door, a complex wave of pain-anger-betrayal-embarrassment washing over her in repeated breakers. If she didn’t go soon, she’d burst into tears or something. /Not in front of everyone./ “Thanks, you guys. I’ll… I hope you have a good invocation, Wil, and…” /Kingman’s Bluff? Really? This whole time you’ve just been kicking it at Kingman’s Bluff, just, what?  _ Avoiding _ me? Did you feel me out here freaking out, or…/

Xan stood, approached her. “Buff. I just want you to know that I… What I said? It’s not because… I mean, I like the guy now. I do. As much as anyone can who…”

Buffy bit her lip hard to keep from crying. “I don’t know if I can right now, Xan.”

“Or you’ll cry. I get it. And that’s okay. Since when can you not cry around us? We’re your friends. And you’re allowed to have, you know, relationship issues. I’m not hating on him, I swear; or you for loving him. I am so way over that. I just wanted you to know that. It’s more just a… you’re the Slayer, and we’re not…”

/And that means it all falls to me. I have to kill him if he misbehaves; I get it, okay Xander?/ And that they didn’t get it that that was her worst nightmare, after Angel, was just absolutely beyond her comprehension. Or maybe they did, but they just didn’t want her to… to run away again after, or...

Xander held up one hand, as if reading her closed-off expression. “Which means we’re not strong, like you. We have to be… wary, no matter what. It’s like… we can like him, okay? But he’s still always gonna be like this half-tamed jaguar you’re keeping as a pet, do you get what I’m saying?”

/A  _ pet? _ You think he’s my… my  _ pet? _ What  _ even _ …/ 

A faint, half-embarrassed smile tickled the corners of her friend’s mouth, as if he had correctly read her incredulous, probably heading-toward-pissed-off expression. He did a little diffident shrug, but stood his ground. “You know how they say that no matter what, even if you raise a wild animal from a baby, they’re still wild? Much less an adult one. They’re never gonna be domesticated, because that takes breeding or whatever. At any time, they could turn on you, because they have all these wild instincts. So yeah.” He did one of his little self-depreciating shrugs. “You’re the expert; the zookeeper. You two can, like, wrestle around, and not get hurt. He can play-bite with you and it’s all good, and you don’t even have to really be scared, unless, I dunno. You’re disabled that day or something. Asleep. I dunno. Because he adores you, and he’s all imprint-y on you.”

Buffy was having serious issues with this analogy. It was like some bestiality thing, instead of a cross-species, sentient… whatever. Like, she got what Xan was trying to say, but… Ugh.

“But that’s it,” Xander went on quietly, eyes focused firmly on hers. “That’s just you. For the rest of us mere mortals… he’s still the wild animal, and he only doesn’t eat us because you love us. Because we belong to you, we smell like you. Any second, he could change his mind and pounce, and none of us are strong enough to stop him. So yeah. I like him now; as much as anyone can like a beautiful, half-tamed jungle-monster that can turn around and rip my head off at any moment, and only care about it so much as it would make you sad, and make you maybe put him in a cage, or put him down, or stop loving and petting him because he hurt one of your friends.” 

The scenario Xander was painting sounded ludicrous to Buffy. Did he not get that Spike would never do that, because her pain was his? Because he would actually feel it as if it was his own?

Apparently not. But it opened up her world to realize the apparent emotional high-wire her friends had been walking in this last year in order to hang out with her and her vamp. 

“To you,” Xander went on softly, “he’s safe. But we can’t ever put away the awareness that he could kill us all. And the worst part is, he wouldn’t care. Not really. Because no matter what he pretends, he doesn’t give a damn about any of us.”

/Oh./ “Actually, he does, Xander,” she told him softly. “He doesn’t want to, so he puts on a big show, but he does. People get into his heart if he spends time, gets close. It’s why all the trying stay away; to keep them all faceless, nameless cattle. But even if he didn’t… he feels what I feel now. It isn’t just being afraid of how I’d react that keeps him from hurting any of you.” /Don’t you get it?/ “He’d not only lose everything…” /Mom, Dawn, his place here as Master, friends, family, a sense of belonging, be branded as a traitor…/ “He feels my affections. And he’d  _ feel _ it, if he hurt you. He’d feel what I felt. He couldn’t live through that any more than I could live through feeling it if I had to dust him.” And turning away, she reached for the door.

Behind her, a vast silence. Disbelief, confusion, maybe a little awe. “He’s not an animal, you guys. And he’s not wild.” And she let the door close behind her as she stepped out. /He’s dangerous, he’s primitive, and he’s a little unpredictable if you don’t get it, if you don’t know how to read him; but he’s not… He’s not what you think./

/And, dammit, I’m all those things too, and when are they gonna  _ get _ that?/

Back turned on Giles’ apartment, she headed for the DeSoto and Kingman’s Bluff. 

***

She pulled up slow and carefully, having navigated the sunset streets of her town with extreme caution, considering a driving slit and a downed window had been her only companions. /You’re lucky I haven’t wrecked your precious car, you idiot./ She’d had to drive it home last night, and now this. /Asshat./ Putting the giant, blacked-out boat into park, she peered through the slit into the red light of sunset, seeking him. And there he was, emerging from the shade of the straggly pines there over to the right to peer out into the horizon like a giant, stupid child, and she was going to kill him. Just pick him up and huck him right over the cliff, because what  _ was _ this? The reverse version of what Angel had done in the sunrise? ‘Uh, I’ll just stand out here and pretend I don’t brood, because that’s what my ‘poncy’ gransire does, but I don’t, thank you very much, and anyway, I’m doing it at sunset, not sunrise, so it’s different because it’s at the other end of the day’. Right. 

Asshole.

She knew he had sensed her by the way he leaned all nonchalantly against the side of the motorcycle without acknowledging her; by the way he appeared relaxed, the way he kept his head turned and gaze on the scarlet horizon, but tensed infinitesimally around his eyes, his shoulders, his arms and hips. “You’re lucky you taught me to drive better,” she informed him acidly as she approached to play her fingers lightly over the one scarred and pitted concrete picnic table. “I could’ve turned your precious ride into a big steel pancake so many times since last night, looking for your dumb ass.”

He nodded slightly, looked down over his crossed arms, and spoke to the rocks at his feet. Scuffed a little, looking darkly amused. “How’d you find me?”

“Witches Incorporated.”

“Interfering little twats.”

Buffy kept her temper under wraps with serious effort, considering he was still blocking her out like a dick. “Helpful, you mean? Considering I didn’t know whether you were dead or alive, or left town, or…” She was giving away too much, bit off the rest of her words and swallowed them before they could come served with a bitter sob. /How  _ could _ you? You  _ promised _ me! You swore…/

He shot her a burning look under his brows, head tilted sideways. “You think I’d leave you? Slayer, you know I couldn’t…”

Buffy cut him off with a hard slice of her hand, away across her body. “I don’t know  _ anything!” _ she blazed. “How  _ could _ I? What are you letting me feel? Nothing! I… I was so  _ scared _ that maybe you were dust and I…” She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t, but…

He dropped his arms, cast his eyes up at the branches over his head. “Oh, bloody hell. Fucksake, Buffy, sometimes a bloke just needs a moment alone. You’d bloody well feel it if I’d snuffed it, even if…”

She wanted to fly at him, beat him up, punch him so hard he was one big giant bruise. How  _ dare _ he act like she was the one overreacting when he… “You think I wouldn’t  _ give _ you that? You think you need to… to shut me out like this to get it? Am I such a horrible burden that you have to scare me half to death just to prove that you’re Mr. Independent Guy, just because we had a fight? I mean, dammit, you’re the one who pushed me into a corner; like there’s ever just one answer! I can’t believe you  _ did _ that to me, when  _ you’re _ the one who taught me there’s  _ never _ only one answer, that nothing’s black and white, that I have to look at everything based on the situation, and then you just… You just put me on the spot, and then got all pissed off when I couldn’t…”

“What the bloody hell are you talking about, Buffy?” 

How  _ dare _ he sound so honestly bewildered?  _ “You _ know!” She really was crying now, because he was a bastard, and what did he  _ want _ from her? “I can’t just… I’m never gonna be able to just say, fine. Yeah. Sure. I know if it happens it’ll probably be for a good reason. I’d like to think it will, because I know you, and I trust you, and you have to know that’s what I’m praying for when it does. That there’s… mitigating circumstances or whatever. That it’s because you’re protecting yourself, or me, or Dawn, or Mom, or fighting to help us stop an apocalypse, or whatever; I don’t care, as long as I have an excuse to write it off, because I don’t believe you’ll ever just throw us away just to have a nice bite sometime. I have so much more faith in us than that, and I believe in your self-control so much more than that. But how can you ask me what I’ll do in some future that hasn’t even happened yet when we’re not even  _ there _ , when you  _ have _ to know that the last thing I ever want to have to do,  _ ever _ , is take sides against you, because I  _ need _ you.” She needed him, she was telling him she needed him, and he was just  _ standing _ there. “Dammit, I  _ need _ you, Spike, and you’re just standing there staring at me like I’m insane, and will you  _ say _ something?”

“Oh, bloody hell, Buffy,” he whispered, and then he  _ was _ there; up against her, holding her in his cool, perfect arms. “Fuck. Love, that’s not why I asked, and that’s not why I left. It’s because sometimes I feel like I can’t…” His voice actually cracked a little. “It’s because it’s hard, Buffy. It really is. I haven’t let you feel it, but it’s unbelievably soddin’ difficult; every day.”

/Oh./

“So I do worry about doin’ it right, pet; livin’ up to what you need of me. I’m terrified of cocking this up and makin’ it harder on you; and it almost happened, right then. It brassed me right off, and I s’pose I wanted you to see. To know I’m  _ not _ strong…”

Her stomach clenched at the naked recital. /Oh. Oh God… Why didn’t you _ tell _ me, all this time? Did you think I’d judge you, or…/ 

/Oh, man; you must be feeling so  _ lonely! _ / 

“And, Christ,” he whispered into her hair, “that was cruel of me. I’m not sure why the sodding hell I felt like I needed to do it, except maybe to salve my own fears. That was bloody well unfair of me. I’m so bleedin’ sorry, love. You mated a right inadequate sod, alright?”

“What?” He was being crazy again. “You’re not. You’re allowed to be scared. This is scary stuff. We’re both trying to change everything about who we are and how we work just to be… this. That’s scary. Neither of us know if we’re gonna make it work. We’re both probably terrified all the time, except…”

He lifted his face away, tugged her chin up to look into her eyes. “Except when we’re feelin’ each other, or when we’re inside each other, and we know it’s right.”

“Yeah,” she breathed.

He sighed and dragged her close again, wrapping his arms around her. “Except, is it? Sometimes it feels like something has to be wrong, yeah? Even though I refuse to believe something’s wrong with how I work. I’m not gonna put it on me. I am what I am. Have been for over a century. Don’t wanna be the wrong one. And I won’t stand for you bein’ the wrong one. But does that mean  _ we’re _ wrong?”

Her arms tightened around him in fierce, automatic denial. “No.” She could never believe that. Nothing that felt like this—like  _ them _ —could ever be wrong.

“Well then,” he told her, all gruff with emotion, “if it’s not us, then it must be you or it must be me. And we’ve established it’s not you…”

She managed a thick half-laugh, because a lot of people would probably beg to differ on the wrongness of a Slayer mated to a Master vampire. “Tell that to the Council.”

“Wankers can go hang. And if it’s not you and it’s not us, then that leaves me, gone sack of hammers for loving the Slayer…”

They’d been over this so many damned times in the last ten months. This was crazy and they both knew it… and none of that mattered. Not even a little bit. “Shh. You’re not allowed to say you’re wrong for loving me or you’ll break my heart.”

He made a faint choking noise, a cross between a chuckle and a sob. “See, then? No way to fix it if no one’s wrong and no one’s right.”

She shook her head against his chest. “We don’t fix it. We work at it every day.”

He went still. “That it, then?”

“Yeah. That’s what Mom says.”

Cue the vampire non-breathing thing. “Oh, Christ. You talked to Mum?”

“I’ve been kind of frantic.” 

Very, very slowly his head fell till his cheek was cushioned on her hair. “Bloody hell. I’m gonna get it square on the arse when I come back with you, innit?”

“Probably.”

He lifted his head to stare longingly out over the Pacific. “Think it’s too late for me to catch a boat out of here?”

She wormed a fist in between them and thumped him on the chest, as hard as she could considering the room she had to work with. “I’ll send my witches after you.”

He leaned back and narrowed his eyes at her. “Yeah, let’s talk about that. Using magicks against me is dirty pool, pet.”

“Tough. I own your ass. You dick.”

He exhaled in that way that said he was conceding a point. “Didn’t mean to worry you, Buffy. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I just…” He trailed off, looking troubled.

Buffy hesitated, but… “Then will you let me back in, dammit?” And, bracing herself in case the answer was no, “I promise… if you ever need, you know, time alone to think without me in there, I can always just…” She cast about in her head, grasping at straws. She didn’t remotely have the language for this, had no idea how it worked. “You can teach me how to turn it off, right, to give you space? You don’t have to…” She heard the quaver in her voice, fought it to a standstill. “Just; please. Don’t do that to me ever again. I can’t deal with it. I lose my mind thinking I’ve lost you. I can’t…”

“Oh, love. I’m so bloody sorry.” Regret filled his tones. “And the worst bit is, I made sure I couldn’t feel what it was doing to you so I didn’t have to bear the punishment for what I did to you by it. Here.” And something… turned, or spread, or irised… and he was wide open again, and it all rushed back. His shame-dread-fear-adoration, the guilty peace he felt when he held her body to his, his never-ending arousal at the scent and feel of her… And he staggered, feeling all that she had carried, near drowning, since he had vanished last night. “Oh Christ. Oh, Buffy, love, c’mere…” And he was carrying her to the table, and she was pulling him down, and there was nothing else but feeling him, and needing to feel him more, to know he was really there. Nothing else, and her skirt was up, her underwear were probably hanging from a tree somewhere. And then he was inside of her, and she was around him, and he was breathing her, and she was breathing him, and that was the only thing. The  _ only _ thing. 

They barely even moved, was the deal. They just rocked, and breathed, limned in red light. That was all. But it was the most  _ intense _ experience she thought she had ever had with him; like some kind of communion while their reconnected sense of one another exploded through brains and bodies, shimmered along nerve pathways, and… And she was tightening… hitching up, breath and legs, around him, and everything inside; stomach muscles and her pelvic floor were…

“Oh, love,” he whispered, and his hand moved to drift between them.

“No,” she managed, through her teeth. “Just… keep…”

He did, cupping her butt in his hands, eyes on hers, forehead pressed to hers. And rocked, and rocked until she just… couldn’t…

“Christ,” he whispered, and dissolved with her.

And then they were just there; motes on the vanished sun and the growing dusk, while moths fluttered around them, attracted to their light in the spreading dimness. Released, Buffy let her head fall finally, turned it toward the cliff and the spreading sea. Out there, the combers moved, mostly silent, but she thought she could hear them swishing, crashing into the bluff below; endless and inexorable. /Or maybe that’s my heart, crashing into you; breaking you down, taking you into me piece by piece. But you’re still here, and we struggle against each other, right? But we’re partners, just like sea and stone. You can’t take one away from the other or they’ll both be just… formless. Nothing. Neither one would mean anything./

“What are you thinking, pet?” he murmured, and kissed her shoulder.

She let the smile show, so that he could see it in the growing dark. “Do you think the sea knows that without the land it wouldn’t mean anything? And the land knows without the sea it would just be this dry husk? Do they mind that one breaks the other one to pieces, and the other one disturbs the rhythm? I mean, it’s worth it, isn’t it, as long as they aren’t just this endless… nothing.”

She thought she heard him chuckle into her neck. “You stay in that class too much longer, pet, and you’ll be in danger of writing better poetry than I ever did.”

Turning back to look at him, Buffy rolled her eyes. “Don’t be stupid. I’ve seen your poetry…”

He jerked back to view her with some pretty intense worry. “Please say you’re joking.”

“Hidden in between the Emerson and the Keats, in that one little black journal…”

“I am going to drain every drop of blood out of your whole sodding body, you invasive little…”

“Shh. I’m enjoying my vampire blankie and looking at the moonrise…”

Grumbling something about nosy Slayer chits, he crawled up between her legs—which uncoupled them, and who gave him permission to do that?—caught her up against him, and rolled them over on the incredibly hard, pitted surface of the table so that she was pillowed against his hard-but-still-softer-than-concrete body. “C’mere. Lay your head, relax, develop convenient amnesia…”

She smiled at his hopeful tones… and yawned. She had not remotely gotten anything that looked like sleep last night, worrying about his missing ass. “Are we sleeping here? Because, indecent exposure, much.”

“Any police come by, I’ll eat them for you. Will just have to get my trousers up above my ankles first so I can catch them without tripping full-length in the dirt.”

She giggled mazily, and yawned again. “My Big Bad vampire, who just wants cuddles…” She trailed her fingers down his chest, found herself mildly irritated that he was still in his t-shirt, and settled for shoving it up to slide her hands around underneath it. Once she had them seated appropriately against his flesh, she smiled more, snuggled her face between his cotton-covered nipples, made a satisfied ‘mmmm’. “Just for a little while.”

“Mmhm.”

She stroked his skin again. “Not a cat. Not…”  _ Yawn _ . “Furry.”

“Beg pardon, love?”

“Purr, though.”

He lowered his head to her throat and made that pleased thrumming noise he made that wasn’t quite a purr, but was really, really close; a slowed-down, happy growl of contentment. “Purr all you want. Go to sleep, pet.”

“Pet,” she answered, slurring it, and half-laughed. “Both…” 

The night faded out.

They were running together, through the familiar desert. The freedom, the rightness of it coursed through her, making her limbs feel incredibly light as they bunched beneath her over the sands. The leash that ran between them—between her thin, gold collar and his thick, black, ornately jeweled leather one—flashed in the sun as it linked them, but did not in any way impede their actions, because they moved as one. He kept pace with her, his shoulder a short breath behind hers, the spots of his body marking him as belonging to the night, while he remained golden, because he could pass from thence to day, and hunt in both, and he was hers. His rich color was vibrant; the same as that of the collar he had gifted her, to sparkle like a queen’s crown at her tawny throat.

As she made her turn he loped alongside her, no communication needed. Still, she nudged his shoulder with her own; playful. He nudged back, batted her with one velveted paw. And then they were rolling, snarling; play-fighting in the sands, and it was glorious under the sun. 

Another presence broke into the moment, drew her to her feet to look up. And there was the other. The First Of Her Kind; standing alone, ever alone, on her stony promontory. Buffy had expected a lioness, but she was all black instead; a part of the night. A panther, hugely muscled and proud, but solitary. Patches of russet color shone just beneath the darkness of her fur, under the sun, with every move; rippling with the heat, so that she nearly vanished with the haze. But the regal head turned to them, feral and sharp in her movements, and pinned them where they stood.

The mated ones stilled momentarily. He came slowly to his feet next to her then, and waited, in case the First One wished to pounce and destroy him.

She moved between them, watchful.

But it wasn’t her mate the First One wished to take. 

The sky darkened. Night fell. And the thing which came instead was oddly put-together, and moved incorrectly. It smelled like a vampire, but also it did not. Felt like a vampire, but did not, because it did not need to.

This one was in no way hiding. 

It shambled near; a figure dressed in rags and skins, furs and hides, gray-fleshed and be-fanged, drawn and sallow and starving. A plague in one being. It snarled vicious rage, an endless hatred, at the first of the Line. Buffy resonated with the recognition of it, somewhere deep within, at a place below where her human brain existed. Where there was nothing but the fight, and death.

And, as if answering for them both Sineya hissed back, teeth bared, mouth wide. And leaped, claws spread.

Even together, they two could not have taken that ancient blood-drinker in the way she did. It was powerful, and it thirsted without care for the spreading of its kind, or the preserving of foodstock. It had come merely to destroy. It was a weapon, nothing more, and it was fearsome. But she, the first, the primeval… she was as much monster as it was, in her own way; in touch with things that those who would come after would be forced to forsake to survive. She was greater than they in the same way that this one was greater than those of its ilk who would come after, and in the same manner; and like it, she needed no weapon. She fought it on its own terms; by tooth and claw, flashed in moments from dreadlocked, feral woman to clawed cat, back again. 

And tore it apart. 

Its head was off, by her bare hands. In moments, it was dust, and Sineya had dropped to all fours, glanced around her through painted eyes… And streaked away, across the desert, the panther once more.

They followed, the mated ones. Needed to see. Found her, as the sun returned, inside a wide cave, with a trench for ordure, and a basket holding food. 

She was chained, about the neck. Bound to the stone. A woman and a panther by turns. Chained animal-like and pacing in her short track, while a man stood at the entrance, holding a staff, ever Watching her. And, squatting at his feet, a younger man held a roll of some paper-like substance, pasted together out of strips of grass. He scribbled on the roll with a reed, dipped in sooty water… and Watched.

“...She is driven by that which is inside her,” the elder of the two quoted, “by her power and her weakness. We gave her this, and so she is ours. She guards the villages by night…” A dramatic pause. “Then the Stealthy Ones came.”

The younger of the Watchers dutifully scribed this down, then lifted his eyes to meet theirs. “She hunts by night,” he told them, stern. “But by day, she must be bound. At first because she is too like them, and then… because she might join them, these new ones who have come.” A shake of the head, disapproving. “She struggles against her new nature. She is torn, and she is too close. Too close to them. Too close to the Animals.” And he lowered his head again, dipped his reed, scribbled fiercely. “Defender, or Destroyer? She must be our instrument, or she will be our downfall. She must never know… that to be enough like them to defeat them, she must be enough like them to want them. To hunt them is to become them. So she must be kept thus. She must be…”

Sineya rose to her feet, hand clutching at the collar at her throat, and stared at the end of her Line. At the both of them, standing near, in the cavern, between her and her captors. She reached out, head cocked at the leash that lay between them. “Always alone,” the voice rang in the cavern, through the unmoving mouth. “So long alone. I was made to be alone. Why was I made like this? One girl in all the world. She alone…” And one dark hand reached out, touched the strand which joined them.

A peal of such, immense loneliness, of vast, utter anguish rang through Buffy’s very being, knocked her off of her feet. She found herself sobbing, curled up on the sands outside, paroxysms making her cough as the winds blew the particles around. And then  _ he _ was there, wrapped around her. “Not anymore. Not anymore, Slayer. Never again.”

And then the First Slayer was there once more, standing before them, head tilted in that curious way; as if she was studying them. She reached out, touched first Buffy’s neck, on her bite (Buffy flinched away, expecting more of that terrific agony, but felt nothing), and then Spike’s neck. He remained still, though he must be terrified of her prowess, as she touched the mark Buffy always renewed on his throat. And then that hand drifted to the empty air between them, touched… something. And Buffy felt a wave of massive, personal envy, coupled with… relief?

Thousands of years, thousands of generations of relief.

“Too late, for all of us. Too late for me. But  _ we _ are glad.  _ We _ are finally free. We are no longer alone.”

/We?/ 

It hit her then. The individual Slayers, as girls, as women, had all died alone, used and abused and tossed aside. But the Line itself, that singular entity? It was finally mated, through her. It was finally freed from its gessa, bound to something else. 

It was finally given expression in something other than the endless round of killing its own, and death, and coming back again to do the same, world without end. 

It finally knew love given back, and not simply given away without return.

Sineya turned away, looked over her shoulder, her painted visage calculating. She pointed, mouth unmoving. Somewhere there in the rocks, the cave mouth beckoned again. 

Buffy glanced at Spike. He shrugged. 

They struck out across the sands. The instant they moved, they were cats again. Which, okay, sure.

Sineya was gone when they reached the rocks. There, at the entrance to the cave…

No. Wait. It wasn’t a cave, but it was cavernous. The door of a warehouse. The sand drifted up along a fence. Chain link. The warehouse loomed amidst the rocks. Against the fence, a security guard eyed them, leaned over. “You forgot your… glow ball?”

Delighted, Buffy caught the diffuse, shimmery thing in her paws, batted it to Spike. He batted it back. They were all set to play with it, to share it forever—it felt precious, felt like theirs—when something loomed. Some dark presence. Enormous, dangerous… and a voice said, “Someone has my key, and I want it!”

Spike snatched the effulgent ball close to his chest, his golden eyes sharp on hers. In full agreement, they ran full-tilt, away toward the rocks, to hide the glowing thing. It had to be kept safe. 

They batted it back and forth between them as the shadow loomed; a desperate game of keepaway while the thing stooped from one to the other of them, seeking, seeking, ever grasping. And then there it was; the cave again. Surely the Line could…

But this was a different cave. Gray and craggy and grown all around with straggling undergrowth. But it was good enough. They dove inside with the ball of light. 

And outside, the shadow passed by. “I can’t see it. Where did you put my key? I’m getting really put out. I’m running out of  _ time _ , you know!”

They huddled inside, in the dark. From somewhere deep within, an insane-sounding, accented voice—a woman’s voice—giggled, “Oh, it’s so pretty! So shiny! But we won’t let her know. If we do, she’ll take it away, and we won’t get to love it.”

Then the darkness faded out, and they were back in Sineya’s cave. But Sineya wasn’t there, and all the First Watchers were all around. And it was them who were looming; circling ever closer, in a noose around Buffy and Spike. “You must know that we’ve come to help you.”

/Sure. We can tell, with all the looming./

Tilted, curious, concerned faces. “You fight a thing you cannot face alone, without us.”

That sounded fun. /Good to know./

Lined visages around them, going stern as the noose tightened. “But first we must punish you.”

/And, less with the fun. Also, no thanks./

Every face darkening with fury. “You’ve broken the rules.”

_ Okay, but the thing is _ … Buffy began. Except, of course, now the dream was doing that thing where she opened her mouth, but she couldn’t talk.

Fury turning rough, building to a chorus. “You belong to  _ us _ .” 

And, why not. She couldn’t really move either. Not even to back away. It was like trying to escape through syrup.

“You’ve removed yourself from the Proper Way.” Looming, the noose ever tightening. “You’ll have to be destroyed.”

She and Spike were back-to-back now, and they weren’t cats anymore. Except, they still had the leash and the collars on, binding them together. 

“It’s unacceptable. Your leash goes there. To the floor. To the wall, where we can control you.”

/And, fuck you too!/

Pointing fingers, from all sides. “His goes to his own kind.”

Spike’s mouth, open in a soundless growl of denial. Buffy joined him, ready to yell it. /He belongs to me now, not  _ them _ . We belong to  _ each other _ . Screw you;  _ all _ of you!/

“Destroy them, or you Destroy us.”

Buffy doubled her fists. It took forever, and more effort than fighting the Master had, but she somehow managed it. And glared her defiance at them. /Oh, go to hell. It’s not that simple. It was  _ never _ that simple./

Around them in a circle, staves rose high, and faces of a dozen Ancient Watchers bloomed with outrage. “This is unnatural.”

/Uhuh, tell me something we don’t already know. But it’s  _ ours, _ and you won’t take it from us!/

“You will not keep it.” A moment of decision; of concert. One of the staves swung down, struck at their link, their claim.

Buffy screamed, anticipating the agony of the severing. 

And then Sineya was there; a raging ebon panther, tearing at them all, jaws agape and ferocious; doing what she had always wanted to do to her tormentors. “No,” she told them, mouth unmoving, even as she wreaked havoc on those who had enslaved her. “We have been given this. We have fought for it. It is Ours. You will not take it from us.”

“See what you have done!” one of the old men shrieked, swinging his staff.

There was a gap in the circle. An out.

The whole mass of the Ancient Watchers were shrieking now, like steam engines, eyes bulging in horror. Shouting in a chorus, one which followed Buffy and Spike as they dove away, through the flailing masses. “You have freeeed her! It will end! It will all ennnnnd!”

Outside, in the free air, under the sun, the panther lazed on the ledge above them and licked the blood from her paws. “I can decide to hunt now when and because I wish to, not because I am chained. They no longer own me.” Lifting one paw, she extruded her claws, licked each one clean, one by one. “I am my own instrument.”

Buffy shivered, remembering the carnage within that tiny, blind cave. Such a small, protected, hateful little world. But faced with this… /All this, without any guides?/ “Can we handle that? Can we walk that line?”

Yellow eyes met hers, so like a vampire’s that it made her almost want to quail. “You are full of Love. Just remember that it belongs in more places than one.” And standing, stretching lazily, the panther turned and sauntered out over the rocks, made a swift jump and, as Sineya now, vanished behind them.

Buffy turned to ask Spike what he thought of that… and had to laugh. He was all leopard-y again; wrapping around her legs, purring loud as a small motorcycle and twining amorously through her knees. He brushed her crotch with his spine at every circuit, all the while gazing up at her with adoring eyes. “You’re gonna tangle your leash.”

He butted his velvet head pointedly against her crotch and purred even louder. 

“Not even. Not when you’re in big-cat form. Human face, definitely. Vamp-face, on special occasions. But cat-face…”

He bared his teeth. Fangs, check. “Okay, but still.”

A huge, rough tongue ran out and nudged her insistently.

She gave his head a shove. “Oh my god, you’re even worse in the dreams than you are out there. Seriously. Wake me up first, at least…”

“I’m tryin’, pet. Have to admit, this is probably the first time you’ve actually pushed me away…”

“Huh?” Sitting up, Buffy blinked around her, startled at the low, diffuse light, the moist, briny chill in the air. And lifted her eyebrows at the very determined vampire settled between her legs, which were currently thrown over his shoulders. “When did you get down there?”

He was crouched on the ground at the end of the table, doing his level best to wake her up with some, ah, predawn surprise. 

He gave her a little nuzzle and jerked his chin at the pearly sky over toward Montecito. “I slipped. And then I figured it was a hint. We’ve about twenty safe minutes before I’ll have to make a dive for the car…” And he nuzzled her again. “How about it, then?”

She dropped her hand to his head and tugged him up to eye him. “Did you sleep?”

“A bit. Why?” But he was studiously avoiding her gaze.

“So, were you there, or did I just imagine you there?” Because if that was a side-effect of mate-bites, then Giles was going to have a heart attack. But this had been her first such dream since they’d closed the claim—her last Slayer dream had been literally the day before they’d done it—so who knew? 

“Was I where, love?” Spike inquired, and laid his cheek patiently against her thigh. 

Maybe he wasn’t, then. /Maybe I just… put you there because you’re a part of me now. “You were in my Slayer dream.”

He frowned slightly, looking bemused. “Was I, then?”

She made to sit up. “Yeah, and it was really kind of intense. I should go tell Giles…”

He gave her a tiny, hopeful shove back toward the table. “How urgent can it be? Surely it doesn’t mean I can’t have at your lovely quim for ten, fifteen minutes…”

He was tough on her resolve. “You do know that no other guy in the entire universe begs for that the way you do.”

“They’re not vampires. Christ, you smell heavenly. Five minutes.” He was already going to work, sensing her weakening. “Just five… minutes…” She gave in and dropped back to the table, her hand sifting through his hair. “Then you can tell… mmm, oh Christ… soddin’ Watcher… he’s been dismissed…”

It took her a second for his words to percolate, since he’d thank god stopped talking finally to make far better use of his mouth—best way ever to shut Spike up, by the way—but the meaning finally did settle in, and she was up and yanking at his hair. Regretfully, but there it was. “You complete, lying…”

He leaned back to watch her warily, face gleaming damply in the low light and eyes strangely similar, right now, to how they had looked in the dream. Like a big cat’s. “You look gorgeous in gold, pet.”

She hovered on the edge of eruption, unsure whether to strangle him, hug him, or punch him. /Not alone./ “Oh my God.”

He didn’t answer. Just ducked back down, hoisting her legs back over his shoulders. “You said not like that. But definitely like this. I’m holdin’ you to that.”

“You… are such… a…”

“Mmhmmmmm…”

“Oh God…” He shouldn’t be allowed to vibrate against her like that. “Evil!”

He slipped his fingers inside of her, curled them up tight until she moaned. And lifted his head again to pin her with a fiercely determined gaze. “Yours,” he answered. And he had never sounded more certain, more inspired, as he settled in to prove it to her. 

And to make her his.

* * *

And we're off to the races.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, young!Buffy is bad at drinking. I will die on that hill. She needs to learn somewhere, though, and Spike's a good coach. 
> 
> Also, Sunnydale needs more visible diversity. Having grown up part-time in SoCal, I will die much, much harder on that hill.
> 
> Everybody send love to wolf_shadoe, who is teh awesome! Everybody send love to yourselves, because you are teh awesome!

“So… getting claim-y with a vampire apparently means they get to share the Slayer dreamscape.”

Giles jerked up in shock at her opener. “I beg your pardon?”

Buffy tugged Spike in out of the rays of the new sun and lifted up their linked hands to indicate that she had meant exactly what she had said. Spike popped out of the neck of his duster like a turtle and grinned. “Hullo, Rupes.” Exactly like he hadn’t been missing for twenty-four hours and scared her shitless in the process. “Top o’ the bloody mornin’. Got any Glen Livet goin’ beggin’? That soddin’ place was a trip and a half.”

Giles stared at the lightly smoking vampire as if he were a new breed of alien. “You’re joking.”

Lifting Buffy’s hand in his, Spike kissed her knuckles. “Gonna go get soused, pet. Need to forget what it felt like to be a great bloody panther, yeah?”

“Leopard. Or maybe a jaguar. I’m not really good with big cats.” But she let him go, albeit reluctantly, so he could go rummage around Giles liquor cabinet uninvited. 

Giles already had his glasses off and was staring at them in horror. “Good Lord, are you actually saying that…”

“Spike. Me. Slayer dream. Really serious one, too. I think there were two, maybe three separate narratives going on in there. Heck, there might’ve been four; but maybe that’s what happens when you cross the streams and bring a stowaway…”

Spike grunted sourly and clinked some stuff under the bar. “This all you have right now, Watcher? Runnin’ right low on the drink, innit?” He clunked a tumbler down hard on the counter and disappeared briefly from the window. He reappeared armed with a bottle in the crook of each elbow and one in hand to set up all three half-empty bottles; all lined up across the counter like little soldiers. “Hell,” he grumbled, “this is barely enough to get me warmed up. Some host you are.”

“I’ll be sure to spend an inordinate amount of money stocking up on vast amounts of spirits for the next time I don’t invite an inveterate drinker to my home. In the meantime, I’ll thank you to restrict yourself to one bottle, Spike, thank you very much.”

“Stingy sod.” In lieu of emptying out Giles’ entire alcohol cache, Spike tugged out a cigarette and shoved it between his lips, and there was about to be a riot in here, wasn’t there? 

A little reason was in order, in the way of soothing the harried beast. Spike hadn’t acted this unsettled when they’d first come out of the dream… but then, that had clearly been a huge-ass act. When going down on her hadn’t settled his nerves, he’d recaptured her on her return trip from the tiny park bathroom and tried a nice round of thoroughly screwing her into the backseat of the DeSoto, stray glints of sun glancing off of his duster to make him all antsy. Except, all that had really accomplished—for him at least—were a few broken springs in the seats.

For her part, Buffy was feeling relaxed and limber and not particularly concerned about much of anything at this moment in time, but her guy’s tension was really kind of putting a damper on her euphoria. /Though, to be fair, I’m pretty used to Slayer dreams. My first one did mess me up pretty good. Looming Lothos and all that crap./ And that one hadn’t even been a full-on, run-around-with-Sineya-getting-desert-portents kind of dream. /And I guess as a first experience, this one really was a doozy./ She supposed she couldn’t blame him for being a little off his game. “I thought you couldn’t get drunk unless you ate a drunk guy or something?” Buffy called after her single-minded vamp. 

“Yeah, well, that’s not really an option for me right now, is it pet?” he demanded pissily, and tossed back a generous measure of something amber that was no doubt strong enough to burn off most of his nose hairs. “Got half a mind to suck down a bloody distillery, considerin’ what Watcher has on offer.” He made a disappointed face. “Might just manage to get a bit tipsy if I do away with all his stock. It’ll be a start.”

“Now, just hold on one bloody minute, here! I don’t care what you saw or heard, I’ve said you don’t have carte blanche to drink off all of my spirits, you intemperate…”

“Spike, come here.”

Grumbling, he rounded the counter with his half-empty tumbler.

“Sit.”

The commands earned her a set of heated glares promising mayhem soonest, but he did as he was told and plunked himself down in their green corner chair. She settled herself in his lap, tugged the drink out of his hand, turned to straddle him. “It’s not gonna help. Here. Look at me.”

He did, reluctantly. Their eyes locked for a long moment. “I’ve been doing this since I was fifteen. They’re all like that. Though… I’m betting it felt even weirder for you…”

He barked out a harsh half-laugh and jerked his gaze away, clearly haunted. “You don’t know the bloody half of it, pet. Whole sodding place felt like it wanted to swallow me. Like it was pulsing. Like bein’ inside a beatin’ heart.” His eyes went gray with anxiety. “Terrifyin’ that. I bloody well love feelin’ that when I’m inside you. Love rememberin’ a little, what that’s like. Like borrowin’ life. But I can get free. Escape. Know it’s not mine; that it’s lent. There… There was no way out. I was inside your sun, your brightness, with it beating all around me. It was everything I’m not. Christ, it was…”

“Anathema to your being,” Giles murmured, sounding intrigued. “How very fascinating.”

Neither of them spared him a glance. “I get it,” Buffy whispered. “It feels very ‘at home’ to me. But… Being in the sun like that…” She brushed his face with her hand, cupped his cheek. He leaned into her touch automatically, closed his eyes. “You weren’t flinching, or…”

“I wasn’t me,” he informed her in an almost-whisper. “Was… that. And  _ that _ could stand it. Was meant to be yours, there. And everything about what they told me there said… long as we’re linked like this, I’m fine.” He straightened a little to eye her, a faint smile hovering around his lips. “You know I’ve been able to take more chances in the sun now, since we’ve been bonded.”

She had noticed, in a subterranean sort of way. Less smoldering, and less terror on her part that he would immediately go up in flames. “It seems to be taking you a little longer to parboil,” she agreed softly.

“Yeah, well; there I knew that I was absolutely safe in the sun as long as I was linked to you. But when they tried to break it…”

The qualm of terror shot through her in memory. The agony of it. If they had… “You would have… died.”

“Gone right up in bloody smoke. And who knows what would’ve happened here, on this side, had they managed it.”

Buffy shivered at the very thought. It had all seemed so real. Did the ancient line of Watchers also have some kind of mojo in the dreamscape? Could they have severed the link between herself and Spike then and there, in the dream? 

“The Line fought back,” she whispered, and caressed his face, wonderingly. “Sineya…”

_ “You _ , Buffy,” Spike answered, and his eyes lit, wonderingly, on her face. “That wild chit out there? That’s what’s in you, you know that, right? That’s the part of you that’s primeval. It’s all one. All one being, forced to live on since the start. And it doesn’t want to be alone again. It’s fought to keep me more’n once, and when those bastards tried to break us apart, it struck. Tore ‘em to shreds. Freed itself.” His hand rose, fingers trailing over her cheek in turn with awe in his gaze. And his eyes were cerulean again with amazement. “You’ll only ever belong to you, now. As a woman, and as a Slayer. That lot can go hang, when they come. They’ve bloody well been retired.”

“I don’t…”

“Now, just hang on a tick…”

With a heavy sigh, Buffy turned around on Spike’s lap and faced down her now thoroughly anxious Watcher. “How about we just tell you the whole thing from the top?”

“Yes. Please. Only let me get my notebook first, so I can take it all down. And for God’s sake, don’t leave anything out.”

They didn’t. And for the record, it was really interesting to have a new perspective on the dream from an outsider’s point of view. But also, the vamp’s-eye-view of the Slayer dream was really, really weird. And it made Buffy seriously rethink some of her positions about her Calling, the Line, her responsibilities… basically everything she had ever taken for granted about herself as the Slayer.

None of which, of course, really sat right with Giles, but then that was kind of fascinating in its own right. Getting another perspective on being the Slayer was pretty much par for the course in the land of Buffy in this last year, so how this was new to her Watcher was beyond her. 

“So… you’re saying that… that the original Slayer was made to fight this… this ancient breed of vampire which… Which registered quite differently to you…”

“Like the Master did, kind of, and Kakistos. Like any other demon, almost, because it wasn’t like it could hide, but also like it… resonated with me, on some incredibly deep level. Somewhere I couldn’t even explain. Like I could turn and point to it, and my brain would stop working and I just… would have to fight it. Like that’s where the ‘kill or be killed’ part of the relationship came from, but I didn’t need to… detect it, if that makes sense?”

“Felt different to me too, for the record. And you can put that down in your bitty notebook, if you like. Didn’t feel like another vamp to me; or at least not one I’d recognize.” Spike tipped back his drink and took another healthy swallow, leaving behind only a faint skim of liquor in the glass, then sat staring into the remains as if he were meditating. “Felt… a bit like I think it’d feel to meet… I dunno.” A short, impatient shrug. “Never was religious. But if Maloker or that other asshat ever came back, I’d think this sort would be the ones They’d call in to serve ‘em, while They’d smite our sort down as useless wankers.” He lifted his eyes to meet Giles’ fascinated gaze, eyes distant and pensive. “Felt… primal, but powerful. Wouldn’t want to fight the bastard. Knew just lookin’ at him he was stronger than me.” Another head-shake. “No, not he. It. It wasn’t a he. It didn’t have a gender, or a sex. It had no need. It simply… was.”

Buffy stared at her guy, amazed at this vampiric sidebar. “But it was still a vamp, and vamps are part human…”

Spike leaned back to give her a candid look. “Not much human in that one, pet. Just a host. And if the human doesn’t influence the demon, then it’s all demon. There’s your difference right there, you want to see what we’re like without any human in us, really. And why would we need human gender an’ the like, when it’s not needed to reproduce us, unless we’re usin’ it to… fraternize with humanity? Which,” he pointed out with a faint smirk, “comes along with the territory of feelin’ a bit human, yeah? In the moments.”

Buffy blinked. “Oh.” So, then, all she had been taught about vampires might have, in fact, come from these ancient ones, and been carried over to be put on a newer, different, and later-evolved type, when none of it even applied. 

“How very intriguing,” Giles put in after a moment, and bent to do some scribbling. “Quite useful, thank you very much indeed, Spike. Very enlightening.” His eyes turned back to Buffy. “And you say that Sineya… She fought it—I would imagine from your description that the vampire in question was a Turok-Han; as Spike has divined, a very ancient and primitive form of vampire—fought it and destroyed it with her bare hands?”

“Ripped the bugger’s head clean off. Claws and teeth an’ all. Like she was in a soddin’ cage match. Was bloody inspirin’.” Spike leaned back, crossed his ankles. “See where you get it now, pet; those times when you go a bit feral, forget to use tools?” He grinned proudly. “‘Mind me to never brass you off when you’re channeling that side of you. Knew you were more’n a match for me, but…” He flicked furiously at his cheap replacement bic and fluttered his eyelashes lasciviously, eyeing her up and down with his mouth and tongue poised in a contemplative and thoroughly suggestive manner. “Knew I was right when I called you a wildcat.”

Buffy rolled her eyes at him and fought not to let Giles see the way she responded, wholly involuntarily, to his arousal. “Save it for later. Jeez.”

His nostrils flared, and he glanced down at the hand occupied with the lighter. His lips did something like a cross between a pout and a moue, then he set his teeth solidly into the bottom one and decided to look mischievous and full of ideas for the rest of time, because he was evil, and she clearly wasn’t fooling him.

Giles cleared his throat loudly. “And you say that these… these early Watchers… kept the poor woman chained in a… a cave somewhere outside their village by day?”

The outrage of it, the horrible, tearing loneliness ripped Buffy away from her contemplation of her personal demonic distraction. “They were scared of what they made. They let her out at night to hunt, but they were afraid to give her too long a leash; afraid she’d get loose and turn on them. And then, once the modern vamps showed up, all stealth with the human faces, I think they were afraid she’d bail on ‘em, so…”

“Oh, surely not…”

Buffy’s head jerked around to glare at her Watcher. “She… or whichever girl it was by that point, was being kept  _ chained up _ , Giles. Treated like an attack dog, not a person, just because they’d stuffed some demon in her; probably against her will. And you have no idea what it’s like to be around vampires;  _ this _ kind, anyway. The pull. The feeling of… kindred. Of knowing that someone’s  _ like _ you. Human, demon; all of it, together. They’re more demon than human and we’re more human than demon, so we’re opposite… but we’re the same. And we both have that thing inside, screaming to go out; fight, kill.” She pinned Giles with her fiercest, most uncompromising look. “Except,  _ ours _ is enslaved. They were made and then turned loose; set free. They can teach us what that means… except we’d have to give up everything we were made to do.” She closed her eyes then, gripping Spike’s thigh tightly, felt herself riding it; that line she always rode, with him. In him, because she could ride it nowhere else and survive. “It tears you apart, if you’re a Slayer,” she whispered, “knowing that. It’s addictive. It’s…”

“A siren song,” Spike murmured, watching her.

“Yes. So… you go to it. Every night. And destroy it before it can destroy you. But if you ever hesitate…”

Giles interrupted harshly. “It bloody well kills you. So they had no worries.”

“They clearly had a few,” Spike snapped back. “It only took one, yeah? One to get old enough, to feel her power, understand… and one of us to get old enough to tire of the game, question it, ask if there’s more.” His hand brushed Buffy’s arm, soothing her down from the frustration of her stubborn Watcher’s ferocious determination to misunderstand. “A century. Less. So many chits… but for the Line, so little time. And they knew… or at least they feared it.”

Buffy’s eyes snapped up to meet Giles’. “So they started putting in insurance. Telling them they were completely human; as if that even makes any sense, with what we can do. Lying to them. Raising them apart, with a Watcher who would shelter them, and teach them only part of the truth. And if they lived long enough to question it, there was always the Cruciamentum.”

Giles flinched back as if she had slapped him. “Buffy, surely you don’t believe…”

She had had a long time to think about it, and it was the only thing that made sense. “I do. There’s always another girl, right? One too young to ask questions, too young to fight back, to want to date, know love, have sex, realize that none of that would ever really work for her out here in the human world… if they could even escape being all sheltered the way Kendra was… which, God. That poor girl couldn’t even talk to  _ Xander!  _ And tell me; what’s the Council’s policy if a Slayer gets pregnant?”

“Well,” Giles sputtered, “that’s scarcely ever happened…”

/Okay, see?/ “Thanks for proving my point. Thousands of incredibly horny girls, all roofied up on violence and nightly slaying, and ‘That’s scarcely ever happened’? I smell a rat.”

Spike straightened a little in the seat to lean up close behind her, all lazy lasciviousness vanished. “They just do away with ‘em, is it, if they get with child? Watchers are told to see to it they’re tripped up in the field, is it? Easy enough to do, while they’re discombobulated with the hormones an’ the like, I ‘magine, an’ then, problem solved, innit?”

Buffy stared at Giles as if she had never seen him before, and waited. 

The glasses were off, and he had gone very pale. His hands were even shaking a little. “It’s… seldom ever happened,” he repeated in broken tones.

“Nun and a boarhound,” Spike reiterated grimly, and leaned back again, voice laden with a boatload of disgust. “Slayer’s right. Do they get out of line, they’re done away with; same as your lot want to do to your girl now. So, time to pick sides, Rupert. What’s it to be?”

Giles gaped at them, clearly horrified at this ultimatum, at the implications. “I’ve… always been on Buffy’s side!”

“Always?” Buffy asked softly.

He closed his eyes, his cheeks now a truly awful putty color. He looked suddenly very old to her eyes, like he was about to just give in and lower his head to the desk or something.

“They’ve been studying us since the start, Giles,” she told him quietly, firmly. “But they’ve never asked. Not like you have. So the one thing they don’t know is what it’s like from the inside. They tell. They instruct, but they don’t listen. Not like you. So I can tell you what it’s like, and maybe that’ll give us the edge, if you’re ready to hear. Because what it’s like, what it was like for Sineya in there, for the Line, and what it’s like for me, out here, now, is this most incredible relief that’s been waiting ten thousand years to come. It’s like being healed, after being torn in two for all of time. And I can keep together, keep whole, if I can just balance on this tightrope. It’s hard, it’s scary… but it’s worth it. Because… you’d think we’d be all integrated, since this thing is in our soul or our essence or whatever? But it’s really not. Vamps are way more integrated than we are. And let me tell you; being torn between two poles like this, as a single, immortal entity, for an eternity?  _ Sucks. _ ” 

“Buffy… I…”

He had never really considered her as part of a thing that had remained alive and unsleeping, on duty, for thousands of years. She was one girl, and the previous girl had been another, and so on and so on. /But I’m not, really. Not once I was Called. I’m all of them. Everything they’ve ever been through, survived… I am the Line. So is Faith. And all we carry—all our personal pains and doubts and fears and phobias and abandonment fantasies… it all just gets mixed in. We are so messed up, as humans and as that thing that has never, ever really been loved and just wants to rest in someone’s arms./

“You have no  _ idea _ . Personally, she envied us  _ so _ much for having what was stolen from her; but the Line… the Line was just so incredibly grateful that we finally chased away the loneliness. Paired it, mated it. It’s been awake and on duty without a rest since it was first Called; for  _ millennia _ , Giles. Do you get that? It never gets to die or sleep… and it’s  _ always _ been alone. Killing, with one eye open, crying for any kind of relief… then dying, and coming right back to start all over. Always alone. Do you know what that feels like, to be… invested with that, all the sudden?” 

/It drew me to Angel. I get that, now. Anyone, anything; any vampire who might give it relief. But that was only ever a half a fix./ “This is  _ the first time _ it’s ever had  _ anyone _ . Ever been matched. But to do that, we did the same thing to the Line that it did to Spike, when we took him out of the loop of his nest; and the Council’s gonna be  _ pissed _ .” She felt Spike’s eyes on her profile, assessing, then his nod of understanding and agreement. It gave her the confidence to go on. “That’s what she was trying to tell us, Giles. Because just like a closed claim removes a vampire from the hierarchy of a nest, it removes a Slayer from the hierarchy the Council imposes on us…” Giles’ head jerked up and he gaped at her, defensive and ready to deny that his compatriots could ever behave like a vampire nest controlling a fledge. But Buffy had had almost a year to think about it. To think about how it had felt to be Called… and what it had felt like to be controlled by the Council. By a Watcher, filled with lies and omissions. 

/I had so much faith in Merrick… because I  _ had  _ to. I didn’t know anything else about this world. I  _ had _ to trust him. And I had the Cliff Notes version. Look at Kendra, taken away from her family, no basis for comparison.../ 

She didn’t give Giles a chance to interrupt. “There’s a reason those bastards in there tried to break our bond, and a reason Sineya lost it, jumped in to defend us. Because this has gone on for ten thousand years, Giles, and what we did? It didn’t just free me.” Certitude filled her now. “It freed the Line. Freed us all from their unnatural, outside control, and gave us…” She thought her way through it, but it felt right. “Gave me back to myself. Heck… maybe all of us, ever after. They’re definitely gonna wanna undo it, if they can.” /I took away every ounce of power the Council ever had over the Slayer Line./ 

“Tore those fuckers to shreds,” Spike agreed, satisfaction oozing from his tones. “They wanted to keep the status quo intact. Slayer in the trap, happy in her bitty cage, singin’ for her supper, me bound only to my kind, us as enemies, full bloody stop. Tried to break it, what binds us. Mad bint as is the Line dove in like a soddin’ dervish, destroyed every last one of ‘em. They didn’t stand a bleedin’ chance.” He grinned broadly, as ever ready to respect the artistry of mayhem. “Was a hell of a thing to see her get her own back for what they’d done to her for all those centuries.” His hand tightened on Buffy’s, threaded through. “She couldn’t do it for thirty-thousand-odd girls before her, but for this one thing, she’d do it, and she’d do it for all the ones who’d died alone. And make sure all the ones from Buffy on down, ever after, stayed free and clear.”

Giles clearly couldn’t even conceive of it. “The… She…”

No way Buffy would let up now. “She said it’s my choice now, Giles. And Faith’s, I suppose. We get to hunt on our own terms. It’s a big responsibility, to decide how to hold that line, without some ancient, mystical group of old jerks holding our noses to the grindstone… but maybe we can, you know, teach each  _ other _ for a change, since now there’re two of us. Create an apprenticeship program or something; I dunno.”

Spike brightened. “Like the Darth Vader and the Emperor.” He paused. “‘Cept I s’pose this is the white hats, so it’s more like Yoda an’ that Skywalker tosser, but chits. Any road, you know what I mean…” He trailed off when Buffy swiveled on his lap to stare at him in amazement. “Oh, come off it, Buffy, those films are soddin’ genius and you know it.”

Shaking her head in disbelief, she turned back in time to watch Giles toss his glasses down on his desk and pinch the bridge of his nose hard between finger and thumb. “I think I might just have an aneurysm.”

“Didn’t drink all the scotch. Probably a better option.”

“That’s highly debatable.” 

Giles definitely looked like he was getting a migraine, the way he was going all squinty around the eyes. And maybe she should give him time to digest the concept that his Slayer had gone rogue in the most mature and predictable way possible; but if she did, he might just spin off the handle and run off back to the fold or something. She couldn’t let him freak out, get all twisted up in his head about it. /I need you on my side, when they come./ “Giles,” she caught his attention softly, “the thing is, they’re coming. We already knew that. Me having a new mindset about it isn’t going to change that. It’s just gonna change how I approach them.”

His head rose, his hand dropped. He regarded her balefully. “Yes, but don’t you see, Buffy; in  _ this _ world, they hold all the power. You must be conciliatory…”

“Why in the bloody hell should she do that, Rupert? Handing her power over to those old sods is why the chits’ve been slaves for ten thousand sodding years in the first bloody place! She should stand her ground right off and tell them all to go right to hell!”

Giles pushed himself away from the desk, shot to his feet. “And convince them she’s exactly what they’ve always feared? Are you  _ mad? _ ”

“Just tellin’ it like it is. She’s the one with the power here, not them, and time they admitted it.”

“You are! You’re raving! They already  _ know _ that, you nit! Pointing it out, letting them know she knows it will just convince them even more that they’ve no choice but to do away with her…”

Spike scoffed so loudly it was amazing that the windows didn’t crack. “Oh, because being mated to William the fucking Bloody won’t already have them convinced?”

“Well, it isn’t as if we have to let them know about that bit…”

“Will you two just  _ stop?” _

Two English dopes swung around mid-harangue to glare at her completely simultaneously, because they had no clue sometimes how alike they were. Of course, if she ever tried to tell them that they’d deny it to death, but… “Look. I know you’re trying to help, and I appreciate it, but… Giles,” she finished wearily, “it’s all over town. How they don’t already know with the spies and whatever you say they have is beyond me. All I can figure is the guys they have working for ‘em are so happy with the new system here that they’re keeping quiet about it because they like me better right now or something, and they wanna see which way the wind’s gonna blow…”

“No demon worth his salt’s ever gonna stick to a paltry paycheck when there’s change in the air. You keep the dosh rollin’ in by sendin’ false reports—like some Watchers I might mention—and you ride the tide by it, see if a better deal’s on the horizon. But the Slayer’s right; they show, start talkin’ to the public, an’ their informants’ll fold, if only to keep up appearances.”

Giles groaned and dropped back to his seat. 

Buffy smoothly took up the baton from her guy. “And we know how they’ll react. You said it first yourself. They hear about this, the wetworks guys will come in first, because I’m a spare, Faith’s doing okay, and why not take out the bad bet who’s a bigger rogue now than she ever was? Heck, if I don’t make a new Slayer when I go and they can’t convince Faith to come back and play ball, they’ll probably knock her off too and start over again with a brand new girl. Easy peasy.”

“Waste of resources to train a new chit,” Spike agreed blandly, “but sometimes you have to take a hit, innit, to make a profit?”

Giles nodded reluctantly, pushed himself back to his feet, and headed for the bar. Without a word, he snatched down a tumbler, resolutely cranked open one of the bottles Spike had lined up, and started pouring. Buffy’s eyes widened when he tugged down not only a second glass but, with a brief hesitation, a third. He filled all three to at least halfway before plopping the now-nearly-empty bottle on the counter. “I find myself torn,” he spoke to the room at large without lifting his head at all, “between the host’s duty to avoid blatant rudeness, and a father’s duty to conform to absurd underage drinking laws. However, since I’ve no doubt you’ve ignored those laws on numerous occasions…”

He would probably be surprised at how seldom, really, she had done so.

“…And since those laws are, in my mind, rather a load of tosh as they’re done in this country, and you being a soldier, not to mention this being a sort of a special occasion…” He gave his head a grim shake and rounded the kitchen doorway to set down his drink on the desk coaster, then approached to hold the other two wordlessly out. 

Buffy fumbled for hers, stunned, held it with the certainty that she had no clue what to do with it. The last time she’d held one of these she had had a set of very clear goals in mind, and had ended up chained up in the basement of a crypt enjoying multiple penetration. As such, being handed hard liquor by her Watcher-cum-father-figure right now was giving her just a slight case of the wiggins. And why was everyone all the sudden handing her drinks or inviting her to join in on toasts, lately? Had she passed some kind of invisible adulting test or something? First Mom, and now Giles. 

She felt like she had entered the Twilight Zone.

Spike, of course, took it all in stride. He merely set aside his empty glass and took the new one with an odd, assessing look in his eye. As Giles walked away to pick up his own, he leaned around to tap the new tumbler to Buffy’s. “To survival, pet.”

Buffy cleared her throat. “Uh… oh. Yeah. Uh…”

She heard the amusement in his voice as he laid his forehead against the back of her neck, felt it rumble through her along their link. “Whole other sort of toast, love. Just a sip. Nothin’ more. Promise to be good.” He paused. “Well. Not  _ good _ , but to behave, at least.”

Giles winced visibly as he lifted his glass. “I pray you never tell me anything of substance regarding that conversation. Now.” And to Buffy’s surprise he tossed back his entire, substantial drink in one vast swig, then lowered the thick vessel to eye her over the top of it, his hazel eyes clear and firm. “Buffy, I want you to know that I trust you implicitly. You’ve shown a level of maturity and foresight in the last year, both with regard to the management of the demon population of this town, and in your current relationship, which I can scarcely credit belonging to a young woman not yet twenty years of age. But then, with few exceptions, and those quite understandable, you have always possessed those qualities, and I have been ever so proud to know you, to have been your Watcher… to love you. And so I will say, that though I am quite terrified of what you are proposing, and though it runs counter to everything I have ever learned or have been taught, I fear I must trust you again. After all…” And he spread his hands… and smiled that one, self-effacing smile of his. “You have been right before in things which too ran counter to all I had been taught, and look what has happened. Look at the relative peace which has descended on this literal mouth of hell, by your partnership with a Master vampire, and by your having, against all logic and right action, chosen to reach across the aisle to join hands with any and all demons who wish peaceable intercourse with you.”

Spike snorted dryly, and Giles blushed. “Oh, do shut up,” he snapped. 

Buffy elbowed her vampire hard in the belly and leaned forward. “Is this your incredibly Gilesish way of saying you’re still with me?” she asked softly.

He watched her quietly across several feet of open space and over the back of his faux-leather couch. “I am,” he answered, and his voice was firm when he said it. “God help me. I’m with you, Buffy.”

“Good on you, man. Didn’t have to sound like such a prat when you said it, though.” Spike tapped his glass lightly once more on Buffy’s, then slugged back his measure of scotch. “Drink up, pet. This is the good shite.”

“Oh God.” She made to sniff it. 

“Just sip, love. Promise, it’s a sight better than the rubbish you had at Willy’s.”

“Good Lord, you took her drinking that bloody awful…”

“Her idea, Rupert.”

Buffy sniffed cautiously at the beverage in her hand, and found herself faintly surprised at the way the fumes did not sear the life out of her sinuses. Instead she actually smelled, like… scents and stuff. “Oh!”

“Yeah,” Spike answered, sounding entertained at her reaction. “What do you pick up, then? Be interesting to hear it from a novice perspective.”

She didn’t bother to toss him a glower. She was too busy parsing all the novel information. “It smells kind of… sweet. And also almost…” She frowned, uncertain if she’d be mocked if she said it. “Buttery?” 

“Go on.”

He sounded so encouraging. “Maybe a little fruitiness. And something… herbal? Something… wild. Forest-y.”

She heard the smile in his voice when he answered. “Well enough to be going on with. Taste it then, pet.”

A little uncertain still, but at least sure that this would be a slightly less dangerous experience than the one at Willy’s bar, Buffy lifted the heavy glass to her lips and took a teeny sip. And was assaulted by as complex a parade of flavors as she had been when Spike and her mother had had her try the wine. 

Then the fumes hit the back of her nasal passages. She choked in amazement, swallowed wrong, and went into a coughing fit.

Spike patted her back, kept rubbing while she fought to deal with the whole breathing experience. She knew that technically the whole ‘rising to the back of your nose’ thing was what it was supposed to do, and wow. It wasn’t sizzling on the way down like the other stuff had done. It was more… trailing down her throat in a warm, comforting blaze to settle in her stomach, cheerful and welcoming. 

Which was precisely when it hit her that she had nothing whatsoever in said stomach, and, /Probably I shouldn’t have agreed to this whole toast thing without food./ 

“Alright, is it?”

Clearing her throat with an effort, Buffy regarded the glass with suspicion. “Okay, that was different.”

“Yeah? Tell me about it.” He really did sound fascinated to hear her experience.

The problem was, there had been so much that she wasn’t sure if she could relate it, or even really parse it enough to get it all into separate strands of information. “Um…” She almost wanted to sip it again to get it all straight, but she was afraid if she did that she would get very swiftly wasted. Which was for sure not a good plan in Giles’ house. “Something fruity, I think? Almost… like cake, even, which, what? And… flowery? And I dunno… almost a little like…” She frowned over her shoulder at Spike. “I feel dumb.”

“Go on.”

“Olive oil. And… kind of… earthy.”

He actually looked proud of her. “Now you see how the experienced whiskey drinker can tell one from the other, even one year from the other. It’s a soddin’ Olympic sport.”

Buffy made a face at him. “Well, if it’s a sport, you’d be cheating. And I can see how it’d be all fun and games for you, since anything where you can bury your face in smells and flavors is the world’s best hobby for Spike.” For the first time, she was really getting it, why he drank so much. It had nothing to do with getting drunk, since half the damn time he couldn’t actually manage it.

It was about the sensory experience. 

He leaned forward, as if to confirm everything she had just said, and whispered in her ear. “I had a choice between that and your sweet cunny, pet, you’d win every time, but I’ll take what I can get.” And he leaned back, looking well pleased with himself.

Buffy shivered.

“Some fine artists work to create this stuff,” he went on, aloud, and lifted the glass to eye the amber liquid in the low light that drifted in between the blinds. “Almost as fine a product as Nature Herself produces.”

Buffy fought hard not to blush in front of Giles. “I hear it’s all in the water,” she tried, po-faced.

Spike chuckled and set aside his tumbler. “I bloody well love you, Slayer.”

Giles, over at his desk, made a sour face and clunked his own drink down heavily. “Right, then. Well.” He turned the pages of his ‘Slayer Dreams’ notebook, as if examining them for clues. “We have a great deal of preparing to do, it sounds like, for an inevitable descent by the Council, if the Line itself is warning you, Buffy, of a visit…”

“Oh! There was that other thing!”

“Oh, yeah. We forgot about the business with that glowing thing-mabob, what with all the turnin’ into great cats an’ the like. Hell, Slayer; you’re s’posed to be good at all this by now, reportin’ in an’ that…”

Buffy half-turned to stare at him in amazement. “We’re here, aren’t we? You were all for heading straight to the crypt to…” She cut off before she could say ‘finish what you started on the bluff’. It was a narrow thing, though, and really, did one sip of alcohol lower her inhibitions that much? How strong  _ was _ that stuff?

Spike smirked. “Yeah. We’re here.” He lifted his eyes to Giles, raised and lowered one shoulder. “Think maybe we got a new portent on the upcoming big bad.”

“Oh?” Giles turned to rummage around on the desk, fished under a pile of books, and tugged out a completely different notebook which, to Buffy’s eye, looked absolutely indistinguishable from the one he’d just been using. “So far we’ve had, ah… ‘a flash of a monk’s face; a person in a ritual robe—perhaps the same person, perhaps another, but human-looking, and quite battered; a glowing light which explodes to create other, flaring lights, quite large, creating rents in the sky. And then creatures exiting from them, of a demonic aspect which you did not recognize’. Is this all correct insofar as you recall, Buffy?” 

“Yeah, that about sums it up.” Buffy shifted uncomfortably, not sure what she was supposed to do with her still half-full glass. She surely shouldn’t drink any more of its contents—she was already feeling just a hair woozy, if definitely still functional—but she couldn’t quite reach the end table to put it down. 

“So, then, what did you see in this latest, ah, excursion? Aside from turning into great cats and traipsing all about the desert apparently instigating rebellion in the Slayer Line.”

Buffy rolled her eyes at him for his ill-timed sarcasm. “Look. I’m sorry I forgot about that part. It’s just, we were so on the whole ‘Slayer Watcher Turrakhan’ thing…”

“Turok-Han,” Giles interrupted, pronouncing the name more slowly.

“Whatever. That we forgot to tell you the part about the glowy deal…” Briefly forgetting that her hand was occupied, Buffy waved it in agitated fashion. Some of the whiskey threatened to slop out over her thumb.

“Here, pet. That’s alcohol abuse.” Spike relieved her of her glass, set it lightly aside. Buffy promptly felt both relieved not to have to hold it anymore, and partly a little frustrated at her inability to conquer the liquid within; like it had won a battle or something. “Bit of a side-trip in the midst of the business with the first Slayer an’ that, but it seemed important for all that, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Hands freed, Buffy gave in and leaned forward, arms on her knees, to swiftly sketch out the part of the dream with the warehouse, the precious glow-ball, the massive, looming form demanding its ‘key’, their desperate game of feline keepaway. She described with some confusion the entirely different cavern where they hid the glowy deal, and the crazy voice inside. “It wasn’t like any kind of cave or rocks I’ve ever seen in the Slayer dreamscape, and the voice was new too. It had…” Buffy frowned, trying to remember. “Kind of an accent. And the dangerous, loomy whatever-it-was just passed us right by, yelling about… What was it, Spike?”

“How it had a timetable to keep or some such shite. Load of bloody nonsense.” His oh-so-mobile lips twisted in disdain. “Are all those dreams that mad? ‘Minds me of the rubbish Dru used to spout.”

/Oh, buddy./ “Seriously; you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I’ve had to figure out over the years. It’s all just a bunch of riddles.”

“Well, doesn’t that lend credence to the whole ‘Dru was a Slayer’ gag…”

Giles lifted a forestalling hand. “Putting that aside… do either of you realize what you’re saying?”

They turned away from their side-rant to regard the Watcher warily. “Not really, no.” Buffy frowned fitfully, because dammit, she was definitely buzzed.

Spike settled his hands firmly about her hips. “Steady on, Slayer.”

It just wasn’t fair. “Seriously, am I like, the polar opposite of you in every way possible? You can’t get drunk at all, and I get drunk if I even walk  _ past _ alcohol?”

He didn’t answer in words, merely smiled and kissed the back of her neck in what felt like apology. 

Giles appeared to be ignoring their byplay. He looked thoroughly concerned. “In effect, having had this particular warning inserted directly into the context of the other, overall dream tells me that the two are related. And the only reason I can think why the Line should connect the two is because the Council is likely to come here specifically because they’ll at some point get wind of this particular threat and wish to interfere or assist in some way, and decide that in your current state, as the mate of a vampire, you, Buffy, are compromised in your ability to battle this… entity which is en route. That they would rather risk destroying you than to permit you to continue to fight even an incredibly dangerous threat, as their most senior, trained, and experienced Slayer, if you are not fully and entirely under their control. Which makes one wonder… what do they think you might do under these circumstances, should you slip the reins and fall entirely away from their influence?”

“Possibly it’s more, what do they fear will come of her being under my influence, innit Rupert?”

Buffy rolled her eyes and, giving in, dropped her head back against his chest. “As if. I’m the top of this little food chain, and don’t you forget it, Buster.”

Spike trailed two fingers lightly along the side of her neck. “Never happen, my love. But try to explain that to them, yeah?”

Trying not to arch up into that touch was, like, a full-time job on the best of days. Why did she take that drink again? “Why does everyone think I have to be under someone’s control? Why can’t I just be, you know, a free woman?”

Spike’s hand dropped away, suddenly businesslike, to settle back to her hip. His voice turned crisp and sardonic. “Dangerous thing, that. Free woman, out in the world of her own recognizance, aware of her power? Can’t bloody well have that.”

Buffy would have reacted to his sarcastic response with ire if she didn’t think he was probably straight up right in his analysis. “Ugh.” She closed her eyes, addressed her Watcher thus in hopes of garnering another interpretation. “You really think that’s what the dream’s telling us, Giles?”

When he set down his pen, it was an action so audible as to damn near echo in the quiet room. “You did report that these Ancient Watchers said they could help you with this business, this grave threat, but only if you severed your link with Spike. That does rather seem to parallel your current situation. I’d hazard the Council might at the very least parrot the same line, should they get wind that there’s some great evil en route to threaten us, and take it as an excuse to come here and attempt to damage the system you’ve built in the last year.”

Buffy felt a blast of ire hit her. With all they had fought for, all they’d sweated over, all the small victories and painful concessions and tiny defeats and setbacks… Dammit, all the embarrassing faux pas, the endless hours spent in negotiations and debates instead of fights, all the  _ conciliation _ … Ugh. All the trying to understand instead of just going with her every instinct to lop off heads and let off the charge, all the swallowing of her martial instincts to just walk away, all the sitting in Willy’s just  _ talking _ … /Oh, like  _ hell _ they will./ She would never have made it without Spike around to bang constantly. And Spike… He was probably being driven just as nuts, with there being no more illegal fledges to put down, and having to act all ‘sheriff’s deputy guy’ and speak softly and carry a big stick instead of just knocking heads together half the time. /And people wonder why we have so much damn sex!/ 

/We  _ built _ this! They’ll wreck it over my cold, lifeless body./

/And,  _ don’t _ say that in front of Spike. Don’t even put it out there; especially since that’s probably maybe their actual  _ plan _ …/ “You know, it’s really, really too bad we can’t find a way to disinvite those jerks. Because this thing we’ve put together… If they mess it up, I’m gonna be super irate.” 

Spike’s fingers tightened on her hips; an unconscious gesture of fervent agreement as she lifted worried eyes to her Watcher’s. “Giles, you really think that’s why they’ll come?”

Giles’ voice was bleak. “I think it very likely. If nothing else, once one or another of their informants becomes frightened enough to break and speak of this new player, I’ve no doubt they’ll send someone in to have a look.”

“Well, balls.”

“And then, wetworks.” The alcohol swirled a little in her stomach, mixing with anxiety and rage to make an unpleasant stew. She toppled back a little against Spike’s chest. “Damn.”

Spike lowered cool hands to her belly, drew her gently in against him. “Fucksake, Slayer. ‘Mind me never to let you drink again unless we’re somewhere a bit more private.”

/Or, you know, never again./ “Okay, but I never got the chance to build up a tolerance. I was too busy having a serious job no one knew about; and what if I was drunk when someone needed me, or...”

Spike sighed heavily and shot Giles some glare-age over her shoulder that she could literally feel. “See what happens, Rupert? Poor girl hasn’t had any sodding practice. Can’t even be let out into the world like this; look at her.”

Her stomach settled slightly, relaxing as her guy plied her with calming vibes. Which was an unfair advantage, but she would definitely take it right now. 

It did nothing for the vague, buzzy swirling, though. No way she could really get anywhere useful with this conversation. “Ugh, I have class, too.”

“No, you bloody well don’t.”

Buffy exhaled in heavy exasperation. “You’re gonna have to take me there, and feed me on the way. Hopefully by then it’ll wear off with the Slayer constitution thingy, because no way I’m gonna take another incomplete. Slayer dreams and sex on a headland are not acceptable excuses to Dr. Crowder, and Giles can’t write me a note anymore. He was the high school librarian, not…” She waved her hand vaguely. 

Giles turned turkey-wattle red and muttered something about how very much he did not need to know about their various escapades.

“Don’t suppose this Crowder bloke will take the excuse that you turned into a great bloody puma along about three AM, and can’t be arsed to come to class till it wears off?” Spike grinned savagely into her neck. “Then I can take you home and we can play more kitten games instead, ‘f I promise to help you with your take-home work after.”

Buffy closed her eyes again, pondering food and bed. “Mmm. That collar really did look good on you.”

She cracked one eye open with an effort when Spike moved to lean away from her. “What?”

He regarded her with a sort of speculative interest, his visible eye gleaming. “That, pet, is an entirely other conversation, and one I’d like to keep outside the bounds of Watcher’s flat, yeah?” And he reached out one arm and casually tossed back the remainders of her drink.

Something very warm skittered down Buffy’s spine into her belly and spread to parts south with rapidity.

“Alright, then.” The glass vanished, snatched from Spike’s hand. The other two were plucked from the tiny end-table, and Giles whirled away. “Please, do get out of here. If I may be blunt, you two smell very intensely of sex; enough so that even  _ I _ can’t miss it. I’d very much like to air out the flat; and since you both insist on continually talking about it, do so somewhere else entirely, thank you.”

Buffy blushed and scrambled off of Spike’s lap, abruptly aware that she had completely lost control of her drunk-ass mouth. “Uh…”

“Spike is quite right, Buffy. You are a thoroughgoing, terrible drinker. Get her out of here, man. And do please feed her something.”

“Right.” Spike heaved himself to his feet. “Come on, then, love.”

Buffy was too horrified to care that she was being practically manhandled out of the apartment. They were very abruptly outside the door, and Spike was performing his standard mummy-wrapping act with his duster before she had even remotely recovered. “Where the hell is your blanket?” she hissed, still mortified.

He tugged it off of a nearby planter, pulled it over his head. “Be a love and don’t trip, yeah? I’m a bit more resilient in the sun now we’ve bonded, but doesn’t mean I can stand up to an extra minute of prying you off of the sidewalk.”

“Okay, look. I’m not that drunk. I’m just a little buzzed.” /And starving. Let’s not forget starving./ “I just need, like, a breakfast sandwich or a mexi-burrito and a…”

“Right! Let’s go to Alita’s!” he exclaimed promptly. “Get one of those massive sodding breakfast burritos the size of my bloody arm what has a dozen eggs in it. You can have the side is all tame and loaded with cheese, and I’ll have ‘em do mine full of tabasco an’ the lot…”

It did sound good. Alita’s did homemade tortillas and everything. “Okay, you’re on.” That might even soak up enough of the alcohol to sober her up. “You paying?”

He grinned at her from under his blanket-cowl. The oblique shafts of bright, morning light from behind him, over to the east, washed his face out to something unnervingly overexposed, and the odd shadows cast from his cover made him look dramatically-lit, like he was in some kind of stage-play and the lighting guy had him in an over-intense focus. /I’m used to seeing you filtered./ 

She wasn’t used at all to seeing her vampire in full daylight. Dusk, yes, sunset and lamplight, but…

“You still gonna eat it if I tell you I nicked a wallet to pay for it?”

She pulled away to shoot him a glare.

His hands went up in surrender. “Kidding, pet.”

Suspicion abounded. “I don’t know about you.”

“Got the tab at the kitten exchange.”

“Uhuh. You and I know you don’t get receipts at that place.” Shaking it off, Buffy set out for the car. “Whatever. I’m going to pretend I don’t know that you still randomly rob people to keep in practice or whatever stupid thing, because I’m hungry. I just hope whatever guy you stole it from wasn’t poor and starving himself today, or I’ll probably die of guilt, and my burrito will taste like ashes…”

There was a profound pause from the vampire she’d left behind, under the eaves. “Oh, fucking hell, Slayer.”

/Win./ 

He still needed practice thinking of them as people with lives, who had to struggle to stay fed. It was her job to nudge him into doing that. He could relate now, for one thing, since for the first time in his long unlife he had to trade cash for his meals. 

She was just opening the passenger door to the car when he came sprinting past to wrench open the driver’s side and dive in. Following, she sat beside him for a moment, the faint, familiar odor of burning vampire and smoking blanket combining unpleasantly with empty stomach and alcohol fumes to make for an unhappy gorge. “Remind me never to invite you to a barbecue.”

Silence, then quietly, “What do you want from me, Buffy?”

A little shrug. She knew she couldn’t change him entirely, and she didn’t want to. “It’s a game for you. It’s just… not a game to me. I dunno. I can’t help but see the consequences. You don’t. I’m not sure what to do about that.”

His fingers, tightening on the steering wheel. Silence, dragging on, then, “There’s one solution. A way I can make ends meet, if you trust me enough. One where I could live off of just cards an’ the like, and I wouldn’t have to supplement.”

She heard the hesitation in his voice, felt it over their link. He was almost afraid to mention it, whatever it was. But something about recent events was urging him to take a shot. Something different. 

She turned to him, waited. His expression was tight. Everything about him. He was letting nothing leak; nothing that she could read in body, in face, or in claim. “Okay?” 

“It’s either take from them… what they need to get on… or take from them what they can spare, and don’t necessarily need. And the difference is, they wouldn’t know, would they? They’d just think things got a bit mad in an alley. All’s fair. And I wouldn’t be budgeting for black market blood. Would make the hell of a difference in my bottom line…”

It took her that long to catch up to what he was saying. /If I trusted you that much. To hold back. Oh my God./ “You want me to say it’s okay for you to…” She trailed off, unable to even finish the sentence.

His jaw tightened. “How’s it different, Buffy, then them giving a donation at Red bloody Cross?”

/How? How? How can you, of all people, even  _ ask _ me that?/  _ “Consent!” _ she burst out, amazed at him.  _ “Consent _ , Spike!”

He looked down at the floor between his elbows, his knees, gave one quick jerk of his head… and reached out to start up the car. He didn’t speak a word. But his jaw, everything in him was still tight, and… 

/Dammit./ Her hand shot out, touched his wrist before he could turn the car over. “You know… that it’s not that I don’t trust you, right? I mean… God knows I trust you more than those idiots at that insane vampire brothel. I should’ve burnt that place to the ground, but you said they’re sticking to the arrangement. You have more self-control than all of them put together, so it’s not that, okay?”

He nodded again, eyes still firmly forward and flashing with…

Oh, crap. She saw the hidden signs now; the wetness, the ferocious battle in him, though he’d cut her off from feeling him. He was fighting back tears of frustration. 

“But they have consent, William,” she whispered softly. “That’s the difference. That’s the  _ only _ difference.”

His mouth tightened. “So if I found someone who…” And then he jerked his head sharply once, in negation. “No. That’s a relationship. I can’t do that, Buffy. It’d be like… cheating.”

/Oh. Oh; God./ This was all so messed up, because she could totally see where he was coming from, and it wasn’t fair; and yet at the same time, from where she stood, things felt equally immovable. “I don’t… I don’t know how…”

The car cranked on, hard enough to make it screech in protest. And he was yanking the wheel swiftly around, away from the curb. “Never mind, Slayer. I’ll get on. Forget about it.”

She could. But no. This was festering, and it was going to get  _ bad _ . Because they were about to go get her something to eat, and she had all these choices; everything and anything she wanted, within reason, and meanwhile she was the reason he was being forced to such narrow options, some of them wholly unappetizing if not practically gross to him. Blood that was out of date, blood that was full of chemicals, blood from animals that did not give him all the things he needed, and it wasn’t fair. “I’m not going to forget about it,” she answered softly. “I want to figure this out.”

He looked hunted as he swung the DeSoto around the corner and up Main toward Alita’s. “Dunno if there’s a middle ground for us.”

/Ouch./ When he called her ‘Slayer’, and said things like that, he was getting bleak about the way their relationship crossed the streams with who and what they were. 

It scared her. “Can I… have some time to just… think about it? Try to work on it inside my own head? I haven’t even thought about it that way before. As something you could…” She fought not to bite her own lip in parody of the sexy little nibble he always did when he was contemplating mayhem. “You know how my brain works. It’s still hard for me to wrap it around live dinner in the first place, much less…”

“Bein’ a party to it. I know.” His tones were clipped, harsh. “Wouldn’t’ve brought it up, except…” He cut off again, yanked the wheel hard over to bump past the entrance into the mom-n-pop awnings of the tiny drive-thru with its hand-lettered sign. They were the third car out, hovering near the three small tables with their hard, fiberglass umbrellas, while a dusty little Yugo that had seen better days halted near the speaker pinned to the post. 

He wouldn’t have brought it up if she hadn’t unbent about his having first crack at Uncle Bob at the Magic Cabinet, and if she hadn’t taken the vamp-whorehouse in stride. She got it. But. /But we’ve been in this relationship for almost a year. I’ve known for almost a year that a vampire can feed without killing. He’s been so incredibly patient, played by my rules; completely by my rules, and mostly probably because he’s grateful that I got that damn chip taken out of his head. But he doesn’t  _ have _ to. He’s  _ never _ had to. No chip, no muzzle, no restraints./

/The only thing that’s holding him back is how he feels about me. The  _ only _ thing. Unless I command him./

/And that would  _ break _ us./

But what was the alternative? To give him the go-ahead to… to find some way to negotiate his meals on the fly? And what would that do to him, after a year of being off hot blood? Would that change how he acted in any way? Xander had compared him to some kind of half-tamed wild animal. They worried about feeding lions live food at the zoo, didn’t they, because hunting instinct? What had they said back during that idiot field trip where the hyenas had taken over her friend? Back in the day they used to think they had to cook the meat to keep the animals from going all crazy and feral, and all that had done was make them sick because they weren’t getting enough vitamins. It turned out it was okay if it was raw… but it had to be dead, because giving them something to chase did things to their brains, and they started to chase anything that moved. 

Like the zookeepers. 

/If you start hunting again, even low-key… will you forget what we’re doing, here? Will you… go through withdrawals when you’re on a slow day and you have to go back to mortuary blood? Will you start seeing meals when you’re hanging with my friends?/

Well, maybe not them. He associated with them too much. /But maybe that was what it was about. She knew it was scaring him, the way he was starting to empathize with just humanity in general. /Do you want it to stop? Do you want to be able to just go back to seeing them as meals? The people you’re starting to see as individuals with stories, and not just Happy Meals with legs?/ 

Because that was the problem. She was  _ glad _ he was starting to empathize with her charges. And if he wanted to turn them back into animated bloodbags in his brain… then that was an issue. If he thought that he didn’t  _ need _ consent from them because they were just cattle, then…

_ “Buenos Dias! Bienvenidos a Alitas!* _ Can I take your order?” 

“Yeah, can we get one large breakfast burrito, but with one side hot, no cheese, and one side mild,  _ con queso*?” _

_ “Ai, Senor Spike, mijo, como esta? Como esta mijita Buffy?”* _

Shaking it off for the moment, Buffy leaned over toward the tinny speaker, called through the cracked wind-wing. “I’m doing alright, thank you, ma’am.”

“I told you,  _ es Tia Alita* _ . You come back every day, you get extra food. You need it,  _ mija _ . You’re going to school, right?”

“Yeah, most of the time…”

“You need to eat, then. You kids at college, you don’t eat enough. How is your mama?”

/I should really come here more just because this lady’s so damn nice./ “She’s doing better, thank you.”

_ “Bueno, bueno*.  _ Okay, see you in a minute.” The speaker cut off as the car in front of them peeled out with a wave.

The DeSoto crept forward. Buffy closed her eyes. “That’s my issue, I guess,” she heard herself whisper. “They  _ have _ to consent, because that means they’re still people to you. People, like Alita, who treats  _ you _ like a person. It brightens her day to talk to you, and I don’t know if you care when you talk to her—if it brightens your day that she likes talking to you, or you’re just playing along, or what; like, is she just potential Happy Meal? I just don’t know—and sometimes I see you creeping closer to ‘they’re all people’… And I dunno if this is you swinging away from that on purpose because you don’t want to feel that, and it’s easier to just keep them food in your head—and food doesn’t have to consent—or if it’s really just about the budget, or…”

Spike sighed heavily. Leaned his head back against the low back of his seat. “If I chat ‘em up for a nip, they’d have to be anonymous. Nameless, faceless. Just one of the thousands, even if I’m not takin’ it to the end.” His eyes cut to hers; just a peripheral shot, but she saw the struggle there. “But not for the reason you think. It’s because if I let it get to me—that they’re people; like you, like the Bit, like Mum or Glinda or Red—then…” He cut off sharply.

“Then you wouldn’t be able to do it?”

That got her not just his profile but a full-on stare. “Course I’d bloody well be able to do it, Buffy. I’m not goin’ in to off ‘em, am I? That’d be the only reason I couldn’t do it, did I see someone I cared about in ‘em!”

Now she was absolutely baffled. “Okay, then wh…”

The car behind them honked loudly, making Buffy jump. Her eyes jerked forward, and… “Oh.” The space in front of them, at the window, was empty. 

Spike pulled forward automatically, under the peeling red awning. Safe in the sparse shade he rolled down the window to exchange brief greetings with the cook. Passed over a couple of bills, took change.

In the ensuing silence, his lips tightened. “When they’re too real, and you bite ‘em, but you don’t do ‘em in, then it becomes intimate, pet. Best to keep it impersonal. If there’s no exchange of cash, then it’s got to be a back-alley sort of thing. One-night stand and best forgotten. Better the poor bird—or bloke, I suppose—feels a bit dirtied than that they get dependent on me for something I can’t give.” He turned to her, eyes fierce, hard, and uncompromising. “I fucking well belong to  _ you _ , is all.”

“Oh,” Buffy breathed, and felt her pulse pounding between her legs at the sudden ferocity in his eyes, his tone, the way it beat at her from the link between them. /I belong to  _ you _ ./

“One large breakfast burrito, hot ‘n mild… Hey there,  _ mija!” _ Alita hustled over to hand them the large, foil-wrapped oblong, dark eyes kind… then paused, arm extended. “Hold up. Trouble in paradise, kids?”

Spike handed the overwarm packet over to Buffy, then tore his eyes away to lean back against the seat once more. “We’ll figure it out.” 

Did he sound tired, though? Tired of there always being something? /No./ “We definitely will,” Buffy insisted, and set aside the burrito on the far side of the seat. The heat seeping from the foil was trying to burn her hand. Freed for the nonce, she moved to slide her hot fingers firmly in between the seat back and her guy’s nape, caught the back of his head. Felt him shiver in reaction as she turned his eyes firmly back to meet hers. “We’ll figure it out.” And, with everything in her, she assured him of that, eyes burning on his.

There was a long, pregnant pause as he assessed her certitude, her willingness, then, “Yeah,” he murmured. “We will.” His eyes glanced briefly away and he flickered a smile at Alita. “Have a good day, Alita.”

“You too,  _ mijo _ . You take care of that girl, okay?”

“Always,” Spike breathed, and put the car back into gear.

Buffy shivered a little at the tone in his voice as he scrolled up the window and they bumped down over the end of the lot.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_ Buenos Dias! Bienvenidos a Alitas!: Good morning, welcome to Alitas! _

_ con queso: with cheese _

_ “Ai, Senor Spike, mijo, como esta? Como esta mijita Buffy?: Eee! Mr. Spike, sweetie, how are you? How is my little girl Buffy? _

_ es Tia Alita: It's Auntie Alita _

_ Bueno, bueno: good, good _

__ mijo, mija, mijita: sweetie / term of endearment  
  
(God, I miss hearing Spanish/Spanglish casually flung about me as I go through my day. Almost as much as the food. OMG; miss it like woah. It's like hearing music floating by my ears.)


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You're all wonderful. Thank you. 
> 
> Herein do our heroes get their shite together and figure things out, at least for a good long stretch.   
> Oh; also there's a reckoning with Giles which never happened in canon, which really still drives me bonkers, because WTF?

They usually started patrols at either Restfield or Willy’s, alternating nights. Wherever they started them, they tended to end them at the crypt unless Buffy had an early class, in which case they would drive back to the dorm after; an altogether safer bet these days since Willow more or less lived with Tara anymore, over at Santa Rosa. Officially they were still roommates according to the Housing Office, but realistically Wil was only at Stevenson about two nights a week, if that.

Buffy leaned against the old Calvert monument and twirled her stake idly, hiding her agitation, she thought, rather well while she waited. It was well past sunset. Her date was massively late; hence her having resorted to conversation with a hunk of marble. “What do you think?” she addressed the self-righteous-looking angel pensively. “Three arguments in however many days… Was it three? Two and a half?”

The statue didn’t weigh in. But then, statues seldom did.

“But also, like, really fantastic fights of the other kind. The good kind. Which, you probably don’t get, but there really is such a thing.”

No answer from statue-land; just an unchanging, benevolent, and slightly tragic smile. Probably heavenly sorts didn’t approve of loving combat, and she was confessing to the wrong guy. 

“And, seriously. Completely amazing sex,” Buffy pointed out, because talk about a check on the pro-side. “Or, I mean, we all know my basis for comparison’s a little skewed, but I think it’s pretty fantastic, and he seems to like it…”

Her cherubic companion remained mute. But perhaps that was to be expected, since cherubim were reportedly ill-suited to conversations on the subject.

“But it’s not all sex,” Buffy hastened to add. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I mean, that’s not even a little bit like that’s all we have going for us. Because, okay,” and here she spread a little perkiness on it, “we also get in, like,  _ all _ the snuggles. And, you know, I think we’re also crazy supportive to each other in between. And then there’s the whole dream-sharing thing, which I think has to count for something…”

“You know the sex is bloody well fabulous, Slayer, so don’t start in on that. Better even than fighting you, which is how this whole mad thing began.” Spike stepped out from behind the nearby Steinberg mausoleum, a piece of shadow coalescing from the darkness to resolve to dark, swirling duster and bright hair. “But between you ‘n me, I’ll take snuggling with you any day over any number of activities… up to and including drinking warm blood from a beating heart.” His face twisted a little, and he glanced away, down at his clenched fists. “Which is really how we’ve got to where we are, innit?” And he stabbed his favorite patrolling sword, naked, deep into the ground to free his hands, then stood before her, as naked as the blade and shining as brightly in the low moonlight. “Because, yeah. We’re both pretty damned supportive of one another. But I suppose at some point we’re bound to reach a limit.” His eyes rose then to meet hers, waiting. “Time to find out, is this it.”

Everything inside Buffy rushed toward him. On any standard night she would immediately barrel forward, jump on him, wrap her legs around him, and they would make out for a while to get revved up for patrol. Maybe spar a little before they finished up on someone else. Or, of course, if patrol was quiet, they’d finish up on each other. Then, inevitably, they would finish  _ with _ each other, either way. But right now, she only watched him, even as she yearned. 

It had been a damn long day since they had parted. He had dropped her off outside the dorm instead of joining her inside. No sneaky smuggling him inside the communal showers to join her in hosing off after a long night’s sexytimes. Leaving him alone and pensive in the car with a quick, distracted kiss, she’d showered solo and with swift functionality, while he had probably done the same back at Revello (that was where he usually showered when she couldn’t successfully sneak him into the dorm one). She had then dutifully gone to class, though mostly she had spent the hours merely pretending to concentrate on school, while she pondered instead the weird, circular trap that was the love-life of a Slayer in a long-term, committed relationship with a Master vampire.

Finally, by the end of her second class, she had given up on taking lecture notes and had instead made an outline.

_ 1) Problem one: Spike is having a hard time keeping himself fed on his budget, without supplementing by victimizing people in other ways that I find just as gross. _

_ *Solution one: he could dig back into the Amara treasure like Mom’s been hinting we should do, get rich (though, how do you even… fence? Is that the word? Stuff that old and demony), and theoretically not ever have this problem again.  _

_ *Issue one: telling him that would be a cop-out, because I would just be avoiding the real question here. He could still do that. But that’s not the point. Not really. The point is he wants to be a self-sufficient vampire, and for me to trust him to be that without all these… riders. Which leads to… _

_ 2) Problem two: I don’t want him playing go-fish with the locals instead, because if they don’t know what he’s taking, they can’t consent, and it’s just as much stealing as taking their money. _

_ *Solution two: he arranges something so that they know what’s happening, so they  _ _ can _ _ consent. _

_ *Issue two: he doesn’t want to do it the consenting way, because that means he’s either a prostitute, or he ends up with ‘regulars’, which means he’s getting too close to relationship status with them, because it steps over the line, at least for them, from ‘biting for food’ to ‘biting for pleasure’. And biting for pleasure is reserved for us. We don’t do it to feed him. We do it because it enhances our relationship. _

_ *Issue two and a half: if he’s doing it all… anonymous and skanky in an alley like some kind of one-night stand, then are they all just cows still? Like me not wanting to get to know Bessie, because I still want to be able to eat burgers and I don’t want to listen to those kids at the Commons telling me meat is murder and I should become a vegetarian? He’s really starting to get it; that they’re people, and if… If he starts doing that again, will he just… go back? _

_ 3) Problem three: I can’t just fix this with… Slayerness, or by telling him what to do. None of that is fair or even works. And if we can’t find middle ground on this… will we lose  _ _ us _ ?

_ Newsflash: I  _ _ can’t _ _ lose us. Hence: _

_ *Solution three: I take that risk. _

_ *Issue three: I have to deal with the consequences, if… _

Class didn’t end before she finished. Mostly because she hadn’t been  _ able _ to finish.

And here she was, staring at him, dying a little inside. Because this was what it had always come down to, from the start. That sword in the chest, and would she ever be able to let that go? /I thought I did. I thought I already had, or I wouldn’t’ve been able to start this. But…/

But what it all came down to, now just like then, was trust. Trust that this was different, like everything was always different. That she could not predicate her current relationship on a past one, no matter how disastrous or tragic. So, they were both vampires. /They’re both male, too. Could be that, I suppose. Maybe Spike’s right about that whole saga, and I should give up guys, hit Faith up./ Ha. But it was a point. If she was going to assume things were doomed to go wrong because of the one commonality, then she should blame any one of a dozen others, and never take a risk on any other guy ever, and this was just dumb. /I need to get past this./ 

What it came down to, really, was… they were mated. And, she was about to face down the Council; about Spike, about her town, about her own instinctive recalcitrance. Then she would be facing down some sort of unknown apocalypse monster opening portals or something to who knew what kind of demon dimensions. And she needed her mate at her side. And, more importantly…

He had the keeping of her. And he did it, beyond admirably. /He keeps me safe. He holds me intact and sane and shares everything with me. My pain, my triumphs, my fears, my struggles… and his own. He’s been more open and giving with me than I actually deserve if…/

She shook herself firmly, laid Mr. Pointy aside on the marble plinth. Eyes on her guy, she took one step closer. /I have to hold him safe too. I have to find a way to do that, equally, or I’m not… I can’t…/

/I have to be worthy of this. I have to do it right, and not take the easy way out./

Vampires existed in hierarchies. Because there was a vampire involved in this bonding thing, one of them had to be on top. That was just the way the blood-thing worked. One of them had to be the top predator in the equation, and so he had, from the start, willingly ceded the deed of his being to her, gave her ascendancy in their relationship. /You trusted me, completely, with all of you, from the start. But that doesn’t mean that I should…  _ take _ that./

What it actually meant was that she had to  _ earn _ it. 

“You gave yourself to me,” she began, softly, fully aware that he would hear her. “You put yourself into my hands. I know it ended up the way it did, but I can’t… use that as an excuse to lord things over you, or to be unfair, or to be a general in our… Our personal relationship, the way I have to be when it comes to battles, or we won’t be a real couple. It’s not okay. I have to make us as equal as I can be in every way I can do it when it’s just us, or… Or this isn’t really a relationship.” She moved one step closer, eyes fixed on him. Saw it, even across the intervening space, in the night; the way the shiver tolled through him. “And you can’t keep taking care of me at your expense.” It didn’t feel like a concession. It just felt real. “That’s not a fair relationship practice.”

For the first time, he took a step closer. Everything in her damn near collapsed in relief. “I dunno how much any of this is about fair, Buffy,” he answered softly, and she heard the choked emotion in his voice. He halted then, about a foot from her. “Christ, I never want to hurt you. I fucking swear to you, I won’t…” He shook his head then, one hard jerk of negation. “No, I can’t promise that. I don’t know if I’ll cock it up. All I can promise is… Bloody hell. I know what you’re saying. What you’re giving. And I swear by all I’ve ever held dear that I will try with everything that’s in me to remember that, and not to hurt you.”

“I know.” It came out a bare whisper. She was shaking inside, tearing apart, the fear of it like a sword ripping through her own vitals. “Just… please… don’t ever make me kill you. Please. I wouldn’t survive it. I can’t… I did it once and I almost died. And that was… That was… I thought that was it, you know? But  _ you _ …” The sob in her voice broke free in spite of herself, and he was there, holding her. “Now, if it was you, I know I’d rather it was me than go through that again.” 

Before she had even finished he was dragging her hard up against his duster, and she was clutching at the leather with all she had, clinging to him and blinking away a blinding haze of tears, and she couldn’t see his throat even though it was right in front of her eyes. “I love too hard, Spike, and I can’t do it again.  _ Especially _ you.”

“Fuck, Buffy, oh Christ, love, I’d never give you a reason to do that.”

“Please.”

He moved away. Started to go to his knees, and oh, damn. He was about to do some crazy vampire fealty thing, wasn’t he. Panic burned in her throat, and she could barely see him through the wash of tears. “No. Don’t. I don’t want that. I don’t want… more. Please. Just… This is about us being  _ here _ . The same.  _ Together _ . Don’t mess it up, okay? Just… When you go…” She shuttered her eyes, so unbelievably afraid of all of it.

He caught her hands between his, voice urgent. “I’ll close up. You won’t have to feel it. And I’ll not tell you about it, if that’s what you want. Or make you a full report, if that’s what you need. Whatever you need, love. And I know it’s…” He tugged her close again, stroking her hair. “Only if I’m havin’ trouble makin’ ends meet, or…”

“No.” She shook her head violently against his chest and pushed away, a surge of frustration rising in her. “Don’t baby me. You’re either doing this or you’re not. I’ll either deal or I won’t. But don’t play the halfway game and make me feel bad about it, okay?”

His mouth tightened in the moonlight, and he dropped his hands, frustrated and helpless. “Right.”

“Look, can we just go kill something?” 

He didn’t answer for a long moment, then, with a faint quirk of his lips, “Sure you don’t wanna fight me? It’s me you’re brassed at, pet. Hate to see you take it out on some poor, defenseless Gragaroch or…”

Swinging away, Buffy grabbed her stake up off of the angel’s plinth and stalked off toward the cemetery exit. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at life. And anyway, I can’t fight you right now. I’m too… conflicted.”

There was a short, weighted silence at her back, then, “One of these days I’ll brass you off enough you’ll stop holdin’ back with me.”

Buffy stopped dead in the manicured grass, frozen by the accusation. “What the hell did you just say to me?”   


“You love me, so you hold back. It’s actually kind of bloody insulting, though I let it be because I love you to distraction.”

She turned back in time to see him picking casually at his fingernails with a splinter he’d picked up from somewhere. “You take that back, you bastard. I don’t hold back with you!” 

“Haven’t even bruised me, save for that little tussle after we found out about Mum, since you were knockin’ me about when you had me a captive plaything at Watcher’s flat last year…”

She gaped at him, flabbergasted. “After… After…” /After seeing you hurt the way I saw you hurt back then, do you think… Do you think I would  _ ever _ …/

His eyes flashed blue fire at her, probably because he could read her like a book. “Suppose you might’ve tried a bit before that, but I had the Gem on me, so you couldn’t. Course, now I’m all Slayer-fed and can take anything you could throw at me…” He went game face and smirked at her, all cocksure arrogance, just egging her on to punch him in the nose, and what  _ was _ this? 

/Oh, you just insured you’re not gonna be ‘Slayer-fed’ for at least a week, you conceited jerk./ “If I didn’t hold back a little, I’d dust you,” she informed him flatly.

He crouched and flicked his fingers at her, all come-hither. “Try me.”

/Oh, I’ll try you. Dick./

Pivoting around in a fast move she knew for a fact she had  _ not _ telegraphed, she sent Mr. Pointy at him in a sudden arc, straight for his shoulder. It was a risky move, but she trusted his instincts. He wouldn’t step into its path. And it would be out of her hands from here on out so they could really  _ do _ this.

She was right. He dove forward, under it, rolled, came up right in front of her. “Still got my weapon,” he told her, all swagger and fangs. “And, well, well, well. Slayer’s defenseless.”

She punched him square in the face, as hard as she could. /As  _ if! _ /

He was laughing when he rolled up off his ass… and it was  _ on _ .

Approximately twenty minutes later they pulled apart, still breathing hard, Spike’s eyes glimmering at her in the moonlight. A cloud scudded overhead as Buffy leveraged herself off of him using a nearby tombstone for stability, chest heaving. 

Her skin made a sort of wet flypaper sound as it unstuck from his, and she sighed heavily.

His hands dropped to her hips. “Give me a mo’ and I could have you all cleaned up, love.”

Her eyes dropped to his bruised lips. The marks were already fading, the blood she’d licked away long gone. “Are we wrong?” she asked him softly. She sure the hell didn’t  _ feel _ wrong. 

She couldn’t feel wrong right now if someone  _ paid _ her. Hell. It would take work to muster up mild concern, but she, of course, managed it, because Buffy. /Anxiety, thy name is Slayer./

His hand rose, caressed her cheek lightly; just two fingers. “Probably,” he whispered, and then grinned. “But we make it right by working at it every day, innit? That’s what you said.”

She closed her eyes. “Not fair throwing my words back in my face.”

“Keeps gettin’ me shagged like that…”

“Hello one-track mind.”

He didn’t deny the accusation. “B’sides; you said you had it from Mum. Either of us told her  _ she _ was wrong, she’d have our ears.”

He had a point there. Buffy wasn’t sure it was possible to refute the wisdom of the relationship ages when it came to the Book of Joyce. “So you’re saying… when we can’t trust our own insanity, we just trust Mom and roll with it?”

“And shag our way out of uncertainty, yeah.”

Buffy rolled her eyes and lowered herself back to his chest, because it was easier than worrying. “That’s your plan.” She couldn’t even muster up disbelief. It was just so Spike, so ‘live in the moment, devil-may-care’, ‘pay for your pleasures later’. 

He freaked her out major sometimes. But he also got her to let go. God knew she needed that, or she’d go back to being a hundred percent ball of guilty anxiety all the time… and living like that…

Retroactively she could say that it had been killing her slowly, before. /This is actually better. Insane, but better./

“It’s been workin’ for us so far, yeah?”

“You’re the absolute limit,” Buffy told him, and stroked her fingers up along his sides. But, in his arms she couldn’t even feel a modicum of disquiet, knew he felt the same. It was nuts. She was sending him off to manage some kind of DIY catch-and-release program, the results of which would be, ultimately, on her head, and what the hell would she tell Giles and the gang, and… And…

And right now, everything was alright. 

They were together.

***

“I don’t think of all of ‘em as cattle, by the way,” he told her a couple evenings later.

“Okay?” Which was definitely a kind of a dopey response, but to be fair, it was a little bit of a non-sequitur. Well, really, a lot a bit of one, since they had actually not been discussing the subject at all; very much on purpose. She knew he had gone out hunting again last night; his first real hunt since before they’d gotten together. He’d done it when he was still mostly set from having drained poor Mr. Bogarty’s body; a purposeful act, she knew, to test himself and make sure he wouldn’t slip. It had gone ‘well’, obviously, or he would have come to her straight up and reported his… well, his failure was probably the wrong word, but… 

He’d asked her quietly if she wanted to hear the details. She had shaken her head in the negative, not trusting herself to speak beyond asking, _ “You’re good?” _

_ “Yeah,” he’d answered tightly. Careful. Oh, so careful. _

_ “And everyone’s…” She’d cut off then, because it would probably be offensive to ask if everyone involved was ‘okay’. If… if there had been an accident, he would have told her from the top. “Sorry. Never mind.” _

_ She had felt the roughly half-dozen emotions course through him, roiling between them. Felt him pull them back, though she had still caught the edges. Frustration, understanding, irritation, offense, pain, tolerance… and finally, compassion. He had lightly brushed her cheek with his thumb. “You know I’d’ve told you right off if I cocked it up.” _

_ She’d bitten her lip. “I’m not trying to be… patronizing, or… I’m trying to just be… your partner here, and not…” _

_ “The Slayer. Know it, love. Can tell how bloody hard it is for you.” He’d stepped closer, hand now brushing, oh so lightly, at her shoulder. “Appreciate the hell out of it. And I understand. I have to separate man and vamp the bloody hell of a lot, with us, when it comes to the same sorts of things…” _

_ The faintly rueful note in his voice made her wonder which things, but she would ask later. “Know you likely need a mo’. Will give you that, if you do. But I love you so bleedin’ much right now, for tryin’ so hard to do right by me. By the both of us. Want to kiss you, but don’t want to make this any harder on you…” _

_ That, she could do. It would actually help; to re-center herself on them, and not on… that. So she had tilted her head up, nodded. “Please. Do that.” _

_ He had, oh so slowly and lightly, set his lips to hers; and oh, wow, he had actually brushed his teeth before coming back to her so she wouldn’t… Oh, man. And she had wrapped her arms around him, brought him back home. _

Leaning forward in the car, Spike turned the radio down. The sounds of whatever Punk band cut off. Buffy thought, given the last year’s education, that that was the Ramones. “It’s why we don’t drain artists. Celebs. Not just because it’d bring too much notice to us, but because they change the world.” His eyes turned to hers, indigo in the low light of the car. “I wouldn’t drain Nancy any more than I’d drain Sid, because she was his muse, and I wouldn’t drain Einstein or Frank Lloyd Wright or sodding Andy Warhol, tosser though he was.” With a sigh, her guy leaned back, lifted his left hand to touch the slightly-sagging material of the car’s white, pleather ceiling. “And, for me, destroying artists, people who create…” He shrugged. “I fancied that I used to be one; or at least I tried. I was a bloody awful poet, but it’s definitely against my ethos to destroy humans as bring beauty and new ideas into the world, especially when I knew none of us sods would do it. We’re too busy wreaking havoc and burning shit down to create anything but more of our own to do the same; least till we get old enough to care again, which…” A faint shrug and a flicker of an eyelid in her direction. “Most don’t, what with one thing or the other. An’ even then, the poetry we create is…”

She’d seen it, his poetry. When he talked about it all—his past, his present, her—it was all steeped in blood, in fire, in violence; in life and death, in wild, burning juxtapositions… and everything was zero-sum. Give or take, live or die, stake or be staked, dust or be dust, throw yourself on the pyre, give your all to every moment. He saw beauty in dualities, in the bombastic, the enormous… 

Once, when he had been human, he would have written about the tiny things and the subtleties. The curves of the petals of a flower. The leaves of a tree opening from a bud. The song of a bird in spring. The smallest moment he ever wrote about now was that one that still made her blush. It had been a very drawn out study of a certain part of her anatomy which… Well. Let it just be said that it was the poetic equivalent of a Georgia O’Keefe painting. 

It had been amazingly quiet piece, like he was trying to say that she could tame him with sex. Which was fairly alarming, but also at least partially true. Sex was an outlet in lieu of a lot of things, for both of them, so, eh. 

“I partied with Jim Morrison in Paris,” he informed her, sounding nostalgic, and it was a measure of her learning curve over the last year that she didn’t need him to tell her who that was. She’d come a long way in Rock n Roll boot camp, courtesy of Spike and, occasionally, her mother. “Sod was about out of his mind. Damn near gone. Would’ve been a blessing to put him out of it by then, but I still hoped he’d pull it out. Bloody genius, that one. Still had it, buried under what he’d done to his brain.” Spike shrugged, settled back in his seat. “Hear some other bastard did him, in the end, to get a high off of him and feel close to greatness. Wanker if they did, though it might explain a lot. Plenty of us are fans of the greats, innit?” A little, resigned shrug. “But he was on his way out anyway.” His eyes flickered over to Buffy’s. “Humans do themselves in easy enough without us, pet. Even the world-changers. It’s all a lottery. Life, death…”

Buffy understood what he was trying to say, but… “But what if the guy on the street who seems like no one is the next Tesla or whatever, but he never gets the chance to do whatever incredible things, because he gets drained instead?”

Spike nodded and turned the wheel, guiding the car around the corner to the downtown block where Giles had asked them all to meet him. “Could happen. In my experience, though, most humans never get the chance to climb out of mediocrity even if they had it in ‘em to be the next Tesla or Sid Vicious or even bloody Mahatma Gandhi, ‘cause the game’s rigged, and the house always wins, and all their dreams in the end’ll die in ignominy; so might as well do ‘em a favor and ease their suffering. Thin out the herd, yeah, so someone else’ll get a shot. Besides…” He shrugged again, all philosophically. “Figure after all these years I’ve gotten good at picking out a loser.”

/Okay, ew./ Probably this was a bad conversation to be getting into, and she shouldn’t keep going with it. 

It burst out of her in spite of the mental proscription. “But how do you  _ know?” _ she demanded. “That’s like assuming you know who’s worth dating, who’ll end up being a bad fit and who’ll end up being a keeper based on just looking at how they dance in the club! If we all really worked like that, you’d have killed me on day one and we would never have found out that we…”

To her shock, Spike interrupted her with a loud, stunned-sounding guffaw… and stopped the car dead in the street. The car behind them honked stridently. He ignored it to turn to her, eyes blazing and as intense as she had ever seen them, sent her a look that burned in her from throat to core to the palms of her hands. “Buffy. Slayer. My love. I knew from the very instant I saw you in that idiot, teenybopper club that you were the One.”

She gaped at him, set alight and utterly thrown. “Wh…”

His hand lifted. Cupped her face, slid down in a slow, wondering caress.

The car behind them honked again, this time really laying on it. He didn’t even blink. “I knew if I didn’t destroy you first, you would destroy me. That you would be either the breaking… or the making of me. Why the bloody hell do you think I fought so hard for so long to kill you… and couldn’t?” And while she remained staring at him in utter shock, he dropped his hand away, back to the steering wheel, and casually turned back to play vampire chauffeur. 

/Oh. My. God./

“Couldn’t tell Dru that, of course,” he went on cheerfully as he swung them around the corner, hand over hand. “Couldn’t even tell myself yet, then.” He narrowed his eyes and ducked his head a little to peer through the driving slit. “Oh, balls, is this really the address? What the bloody hell are you up to, Rupert?” As if he hadn’t interrupted himself, he calmly began the process of parallel parking and picked up where he’d left off while Buffy went on staring at him in stunned amazement. “I pride myself in being the perfect partner, yeah? Wouldn’t do to admit I’d been transfixed by another woman.” Satisfied with his parking job, he cut off the engine, patted the dash... and just sat for a moment looking out through the slit into the night, under the streetlamp. “Sometimes you just know, with people. That they’re bloody well special, pet, even if you don’t know why, or what they’ll be. What they’ll do. ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em’... but you can still smell it.” 

He gave himself a little shake, then, and turned to her, lifting one scarred brow. “So. Did Watcher tell us why the hell we’re back here at this sodding place?”

Mouth hanging open, Buffy struggled to find some sort of verbal response to this mishmash assault of information and questions. “Um…” She leaned over automatically and stretched full-length, pushing upward on one hand to get her own glimpse through the slit, and, oh. They were in front of the now-defunct Magic Cabinet. “Not really. He just said it was a surprise…” Dropping back to the seat, Buffy stared at her guy, unable to get out more than a whisper. “You… knew?”

He smirked a little and tilted his head to watch her in that way he had where she felt both incredibly seen, and insanely cherished. “Not so as I  _ knew _ it yet, but yeah. I was already yours. Balls to bone. Just had to wait a bit for us both to admit it.” His face clouded slightly, and he turned away. “And, of course, Dru had to get over bein’ brassed about it. Which… I wonder now, since she’d had so much bloody warning—damn near twenty years to get used to the idea—why did she blame me?”

Buffy touched his hand. /That, I can answer./ “Because she made you for her, and whether she knew it was gonna happen or not, she didn’t want to give you up. Even if she knew someday you’d want to go your own way, it still hurt when the time finally came.” It hit Buffy then, like a bolt of lightning. “And because she didn’t get Angel back like she thought she would, because I messed that up for her too by making that deal with you, so she couldn’t win either way. And she just wants someone to want to stay with her.” /And can I really blame her for that?/

“Yeah,” Spike whispered sadly. “That’s all she ever really wanted. For her Daddy to want to stay. I was just a stand-in.” His eyes rose to meet Buffy’s, sad and regretful. “I tried my damnedest, but I never really was what she wanted.”

Buffy reached up to cup his cheek. “You’re everything I want, for what it’s worth.”

His eyes glowed on hers in the dark. “Why the bloody hell do you think I’m here, you daft bint, canoodling with a soddin’ Slayer instead of takin’ throats alone somewhere in Lisbon or some bloody thing?”

Rolling her eyes, Buffy dropped her hand. “Way to kill the moment, Mr. ‘This is getting too smooshy, so I’m gonna go all prickly’.”

“You mock me and I’ll eat you.”

“Uhuh. Get out of the car and we’ll go see what the heck Giles wants.” She gave him a shove. He was such a dope. 

She was absolutely, completely, ridiculously crazy about him. /You knew? From day one, you  _ knew? _ / She flounced through the door he held for her, sideways and absently as ever, one arm stretched high over her head. /What  _ even _ ./

***

“I’d like to thank everyone for coming,” Giles spoke up to the assembled as they found a spot to lean up against an inside wall. The dusty, somewhat denuded interior of the Cupboard looked a forlorn setting around him where he stood, dead center in the room with the miscellaneous slayerettes gathered around him. “No doubt you are all wondering why I’ve requested that we all meet at this locale…”

“Could say that,” Spike drawled, shoulder-blades pressed against his stretch of real estate next to a curling poster announcing ‘Tarot Readings Every Wednesday!’ He cocked one leg back against the wall, planted his boot there, threw his right arm over Buffy’s shoulders, and tilted his head curiously. “Developed a sudden yen for necromancy, is it, Rupert?” A faint grin teased the corners of his mouth. “Or a resurgent one?”

“Oh, do shut it, Spike,” Giles answered mildly. Buffy elbowed her vampire in the ribs. His expression didn’t alter in the slightest, unless it was to curl his tongue a little more in celebration for having gotten Giles’ goat.

Her Watcher sighed heavily and picked up where he had been interrupted. “I asked you all here because I have decided… that Buffy was correct the other day. We need a new headquarters; one preferably somewhere divorced from my home. And in view of that… I have decided to make an investment.” He straightened. “I’ve made an offer on the Cupboard…” He paused, looked slightly bemused for a moment. “Rather a low one, actually. I’m surprised it’s been accepted. It seems the proprietors of this establishment have the unfortunate tendency to die under, ah, mysterious circumstances, and on a distressingly regular basis.” He shot a pointed glance at Buffy. “Their not having direct Slayer protection, I’d imagine, has something to do with it. Dabbling in the edges of the occult while living in Sunnydale does, one knows, come with its own set of risks…”

Buffy was still struggling to catch up. /‘Made an offer’ as in…/ “You… You’re…  _ buying _ the Cupboard?” she blurted, flummoxed.

“Yes, well, I daresay I shall probably end in changing the name to something somewhat less unwieldly than ‘The Magic Cupboard’, much less ‘Uncle Bob’s’ anything.”

“Really?” Willow half-shrieked, sounding elated, and started to bounce. “Oh my Goddess, this is so  _ exciting!”  _ Her hand must have spasmed in her enthusiasm, because a little of the contents from the juice-box she’d been drinking squirted out of the straw onto the dusty floor. 

“Wow. That’s… a heck of a leap,” Jonathan put in. “Congratulations, Mr. Giles. From lowly, penniless Watcher-slash-librarian to businessman.”

“Why… thank you, Jonathan. I appreciate that. I think.”

Tara looked amazed. “Yes. Um, congratulations, Mr. Giles. Wow. That’s… That’s really…”

“Oh my Goddess, do we get  _ discounts?” _ Willow demanded, still at about half-squeal, and then looked down at her feet, the droplets falling from her wrist. “Oops.”

“Not if he’s being a savvy businessman,” Anya put in blandly, “or you’ll run him into the dirt.” She put on her shrewd face, looking thoughtful. “You’ll need someone to help you get this thing off the ground, or you’ll fumble it badly, with this bunch around trying to rob your back pocket the entire time and leaning on you for handouts.” She shrugged slightly, as if having weighed her options on something and made a decision. “Joyce is getting back into the swing of things. I can do the budgeting and promotions for the gallery in my sleep, and we manage the counter together part-time now that she’s back on her feet. I’ll come in twice a week and whenever you need me in the evenings till you’re stable, and then we’ll work out a regular schedule for me. We can discuss appropriate remuneration in private.”

Xander gaped at her. “He didn’t  _ ask _ , Ahn!”

Anya blew that off with a wave of her hand. “He would have eventually. Best to just put it out there now, before he’s driven to it  _ in extremis _ , when the damage is already done.”

Giles closed his mouth with clear effort. Apparently everything was going just a little too fast for him. “Ah… That’s… That’s exceedingly generous of you, Anya. I hadn’t… But of course I’d be more than grateful for any…”

Everything was going too fast for Buffy, too. She flung up one hand, amazed. She hadn’t realized that her offhand and, to be real, pretty much snarky commentary the other day would inspire such a massive leap of faith. Also… buying a  _ business? _ Renting a spot for it downtown?

Where the hell was Giles getting the cash for this?  _ “How?” _ she demanded, floored.

“Got a bit of dosh squirreled away, is it, Watcher?” Spike put in on her heels, sounding as cynical as she had ever heard him.

Giles blinked at his tone. “It’s always prudent to put aside some small portion of one’s income in reserve for possible future endeavors, or in case of emergency, yes.”

Buffy opened her mouth to ask Spike why he had that… that note in his voice, then it hit her out of the blue. /Because it was always a job to him. He got paid… and he could always quit. It’s not… a Calling. He could always opt out. I don’t get paid… and I can never leave./

Closing her eyes, Buffy straightened under Spike’s arm. “Must be nice to get a paycheck every month for long enough to have enough saved up to buy a whole business.”

Giles’ eyes jumped to hers. He stared for a long moment… and then the glasses came off. “Yes, well… of course, traditionally, some of those monies were meant to provide for the Slayer’s care and feeding as well. But since you were living with your mother, I…”

“Kept it for yourself and decided to go into business, is it, Watcher?”

Giles gaped as if Spike had run him through the heart. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Spike, what do you take me for? Buffy’s part of all of this is quietly put by. Invested, if you really want to know, and very prudently. Should she ever badly need it, I can take it out and hand it over straightaway…”

Spike nodded and reached into his duster pocket. “Nice of you to let the Slayer know  _ you  _ could’ve paid her, at least, all this bloody time.” He turned to Buffy, who was staring in shock at her Watcher. “I’m for a smoke, pet. You staying in?” Everything about him radiated disgust.

“I… I guess, for a minute. I need to… understand.”

He nodded. “Dinner’s in a few minutes, with Mum,” he reminded her, tipped her chin up with two fingers, kissed her soundly and without preamble. And left her with her mind whirling to march for the door, his antipathy palpable in the air around her and swirling through her solar plexus where the link between them seemed to percolate like a live thing.

The silence he left behind coiled through the room, muscular and flexing. All around her, the Scoobies exchanged nervous and uncertain glances. 

Buffy felt a wash of anxiety and embarrassment. Should she apologize for Spike? Say she didn’t know what had gotten into him, that she was sorry, that she didn’t think she should get rewarded for doing her job, that she knew it was more than a part-time gig waitressing in a diner, or… That it was a  _ Calling _ , and…

“Spike is quite correct,” Giles murmured quietly after a moment, and broke the strained silence to move to the one chair near the counter. Sat, replaced his glasses slowly. “Of course, in the view of the Council, you are meant to be dependent upon your Watcher, performing tasks as directed while living on a portion of his stipend, but that was never the case for you. Not to mention that you’ve taken on apocalypse after apocalypse without qualm and faced things most Slayers don’t, who have never had to surmount the obstacles of a breached and awakened hellmouth. And you have not only met but survived and put down every one of those challenges. You have reached your majority, and no longer live either under your mother’s roof, or mine. Very shortly you will no longer be supported by student monies, so I suppose it’s meet that we should discuss some sort of remuneration for you, so that you can look to your future outside the involvement of guiding or parental figures…” He shook his head wonderingly. “Lord knows poor Faith never even had that. She’d reached her majority, such as it was, before she even came to us, and look how badly we bungled that whole blasted mess.”

Buffy saw those godawful motel rooms, again, in her mind’s eye, and shivered. Faith had always blown it off as no big deal, had confessed once to Buffy that before her first Watcher had taken her in hand, she had been on her own for a long while; a wild Potential with family issues, tossed out of school due to Massachusetts truancy laws. That she had been ‘flying solo’ long before she had ended up in California. Buffy kind of got the vibe that her Watcher’s place had been her first steady home in a long while, and that losing that whole gig had been a much bigger blow to her sister-Slayer than Faith ever liked to let on; hence the serious fallout over Gwendolyn Post’s betrayal. 

Whatever Faith pretended, and no matter how hard she had protested, over and over, that she was fine at the motel, that she didn’t care as long as she ate and had her rent paid, she had probably always really wanted a stable home and someone to care about her.

/People’s exhibit A, Christmas./ When she’d been invited over for Christmas dinner that time, she had been way nervous around Mom, but she had completely bloomed, too. Hesitantly, but… there it was. It was clear, though, that she had also had no idea what to do with open generosity without strings. 

God, no wonder she’d fallen headfirst for the Mayor’s blandishments. The guy had made sense for her. That whole thing had had the strings of being a job. She could feel like she was paying for her care and feeding, so she didn’t have to freak out wondering when the other shoe would drop… and man, sometimes, retroactively, Faith just broke Buffy’s heart. /I was too young and, like, sheltered a couple years ago to  _ get _ you./

She would never totally understand, obviously. For all the crap that had been of the suck for Buffy Summers, she had had a relatively stable home life. There had been the divorce, sure, but she had had Giles… and she had only been on her own without support once for a summer. The end. Faith… /God, I hope you figure it out and come out alright./

Giles had lifted his eyes to meet Buffy’s with ironic regard. “Neither of you really fit in any way within the Council paradigm,” he pointed out blandly. Exhaling heavily, he removed his glasses once more, set them aside on his corduroy-clad knee. “Both of you quite thoroughly defied the model. Find the Slayer, preferably before she is Called. Keep her safe. Indoctrinate her while she is still a Potential, so that she accepts her Calling without question. Shelter her, train her, feed and clothe her… and when she… goes…” His voice trembled slightly. “Another is located and treated likewise.” His eyes rose to Buffy’s, watery hazel and stricken. “There’s never been any sort of advice as to how to assist a Slayer who’s a grown adult facing a life outside of a Watcher’s purview. I’m the one who needs guidance for that next big step. And I am very sorry indeed if I’ve hurt you by mismanaging it.”

And it was all alright again. “I get it,” Buffy heard herself whisper. “And I get that… it’s not a job. I know that I don’t get to just… quit. I know they probably figure… if they pay us, we might think of it that way. But… I get it, and I don’t. I never will.” She tried a tiny smile, a hint of her old sixteen-year-old nonchalance. “But… it might come in handy, someday, to have a little pocket change.”

Giles’ face creased into that handsome, sweet smile of his that made him the best dad-material-guy in the universe. “Buffy, at the risk of seeing you buy the Lord only knows how many more shoes you could never hope to wear, I understand the sentiment. We’ll discuss it further, rest assured.” He glanced around the room at the very uncomfortable Scooby masses. “Privately.”

/Oh. Yeah./ “Right.”

“Well, then.” Pushing himself to his feet, Giles hooked his glasses back over his ears. “I’ll be taking suggestions as to the name of this terrifying little investment. I of course regret the death of our dear Mr. Bogarty, but despite Uncle Bob’s passing I don’t feel it’s incumbent on me to immortalize his name on the marquee, so any ideas that are forthcoming and trip off the tongue with greater ease would be much appreciated.”

Tara hesitated visibly, then, “W…what ab…bout ‘The Magic B…Box’? It’s s…simple, and it says it all. It holds m…magickal items, and it opens to g…give you what you n…need, and…” She trailed off and ducked her head shyly when all eyes turned her way.   


“Baby, that’s a great suggestion. Don’t hide.”

“It’s certainly far more attractive than ‘Uncle Bob’s Magic Cabinet’,” Anya put in. “I always thought that sounded like something a child molester would call his business.”

“For once,” Xander put in, high-pitched and uncomfortable, “I’m in total agreeance with you, Sweetie. Much with the ew on the old name.” He hesitated, then, “Not to sound like a total guy, but isn’t ‘The Magic Box’ kind of a little bit of a double entendre, though?” He was the recipient of not a few confused glances. “No? Just me? I’m just sayin’, if I was a chick, I’d be kind of offende…”

“Oh my God, Xander, ew!” Willow exclaimed, and threw her empty juice box at him. He ducked just in time to avoid a spatter collision with his head. The box bounced instead off of the wall behind him, leaving a faint, sticky spray on one dark, forest-green panel. 

“Excellent. Now I’ll have to clean over there as well.” Sighing, Giles returned to his seat. “Meeting adjourned. Do, please, all of you, go away.” He turned to a badly blushing Tara. “Thank you, Tara. I actually rather like the name, despite Xander’s ill-timed and truly gauche attempts at humor.”

“O…okay…”

“Hey, I was just pointing out a possible flaw in the sales pitch…”

“Xander, sometimes I wonder why I sleep with you…”

“Why  _ do _ you sleep with him?” Jonathan queried, sounding openly curious as they all headed for the door. 

“Well, he really is very good in bed.”

“Huh,” Jonathan answered in an assessing tone of voice as he followed them out the door. Buffy kind of thought the little guy might be checking out the Xan-man’s butt, which was… well. 

/Not my circus, not my monkeys./

Left alone with Giles in the ringing, empty space, Buffy held her breath for a moment, then took a step closer. “I’ve really challenged your worldview in the last year, haven’t I?”

His gaze rose to meet hers, and for the first time she noticed how many more crows-feet there were around the faded-looking green of his eyes than there had been last year. How many more than there had been since Angelus, and Jenny, but definitely since last year. “You have, yes, Buffy… but I believe it has been necessary, or that business with…” He hesitated. “…With Angel might have hardened me and my opinions, turned me into a caricature of myself. I was so very ready to see what had occurred between you and Spike in that motel and to say, ‘Please, Buffy, whatever has happened, do not let pity move you. I know your generosity of heart, but a tiger does not change his stripes, nor does a vampire put aside his fangs for love’…” 

Buffy quailed, almost took a step back. Had Giles guessed what…

“And yet… how very wrong was I, to have thought that; and based entirely on the actions of an entirely other man, an entirely other monster who had nothing to do with this one…”

The tears were too close to the surface. She couldn’t answer.

He watched her. It was what Giles did. And then he nodded. “And so,” he answered softly, “I learned. I learned, as you did, that all they had in common was a species. Nothing else. As little and as much as you and I…” He smiled then, and lifted his hand to brush the air near her cheek. “A very great deal, sometimes, and yet sometimes nothing, isn’t it? And so you must find your way, with everyone, and take them as they come, deal with them as they present themselves.” He paused for a moment, dropped his hand, and his voice throbbed suddenly with a profound swell of emotion. “Buffy, I am so unbelievably, enormously proud of you. You are capable of things which I, and so many others cannot imagine. You can still open your heart, when it has been harmed more than anyone your age should ever have to endure. Treasure that. It is a power stronger even than that of your Calling…” He drew in a deep breath, as if he hoped it would fortify him, and dropped his hand. “And I pray it will guide you as you navigate new and treacherous ground, without anything at all like a map.”

Buffy knew she was shaking. Everything in her was exploding with the wholly unexpected praise. She felt overwhelmed, and from some great distance she could feel Spike tugging at her; a request for reassurance, an ‘are you alright, love?’ on their link. Any second he would come bursting back in to demand to know what had her so het up. But for now… “Is that why… Why you’re standing with me—with  _ us _ —against them?”

The broken bell on the door raged as Spike exploded in, eyes wild. Having sensed him coming Buffy already had her hand out, an automatic bid to request clemency. She was fine. She needed to know…

He halted in the doorway, waiting. Eyed them both, as she watched Giles’ eyes flicker to meet Spike’s briefly, bounce back to hers. 

“I wouldn’t have been once, Buffy. A year ago, two years ago… No more than you would have. But I’ve learned that I cannot model my beliefs on Angelus. He was, I am sorry to say, simply a right old sod, with a bastard of a demon to match.”

Buffy flinched at this very blunt assessment. If Giles saw it, he didn’t pause to assuage her feelings or to pull punches. “And perhaps that was because without the curse to tame him down, the man was as well, and found the right demon to match him. I think it more likely, though, that he made the demon a hell of a bastard so he could do all he couldn’t before. Of course, with the curse on we’ll never know for sure, and that’s what gave us all this cognitive dissonance on how the whole bloody thing works, but...” His eyes broke away to touch once more on Spike, hovering behind them. “But we’ve since learned better, haven’t we? Because it follows that if Drusilla was a broken Slayer needing a champion to look after her, then she must have found herself quite a decent man to serve in that capacity.” 

Buffy heard the sharp intake of breath from Spike, felt the way Giles’ words struck him, square between the eyes. 

“Which means that that man must have made a decent demon of his new, replacement soul. So, you see,” he went on, turning his disarmed gaze back to Buffy, “I believe I understand a great deal more, now, of how it works.” He smiled slightly; that quiet smile of his that said he was feeling a little self-depreciating. “I, who knew so damned much; a very little about everything, and a very great deal, obviously, about vampires…”

Spike snorted lightly from his station, but without the withering note that would have accompanied the sound at any other time. 

“Any road,” Giles went on quietly, “even if I wanted to, I simply would rather not use Angelus as a model any longer. I would far rather use Spike.” He tilted his head back against the chair to eye her vampire from under his unshielded lashes. “I would rather be hopeful than cynical.”

From the doorway, a muffled, “Bloody hell.”

Giles turned his naked gaze back to Buffy’s, smiled. “I would rather do as you’re doing, Buffy, and seek peaceful coexistence with a world I, too, confess I know somewhat well, and wouldn’t like to see gone from the map. I would far prefer to keep that world intact, even as a mere dabbler, than to fight it to the point of annihilation.” He looked down, into his open palms, cupped in his lap. His expression turned troubled as he tapped his glasses, stem held between two fingers, on one palm. “Yes, even if embracing your current methods and goals runs counter to everything the Council’s ever taught; because it means that rather than winning this war by genocide, we might instead end it in a peace accord… and all my knowledge and study might in the end continue to be useful.” A faint, self-mocking little shrug. “Because, call me greedy, but there is also the point that I might not be working to render myself obsolete in the process.”

“Wh…”

He lifted his gaze, a faint smile twitching at the corners of his lips. “I’m already sacked. I’d much rather keep myself a place at the Slayer’s side, if only as an honored councilor or a sort of Watcher emeritus, than work my way entirely out of a job because I’d helped to wipe out the demonic world like some sort of mad, murdering fiend.” His eyes twinkled at her then. “So, really, you’re asking me to pay you, or to negotiate pay  _ for _ you from those testy old sods, and really all I’m hoping is that there’ll be a place for me someday in your ranks while you go on reordering the universe to your liking; because you’re the  _ future _ , Buffy.” And while she gaped at him, stunned that anyone could call a Slayer, expiration date and all, ‘the future’, he simply smiled at her with blazing certitude and went on blowing her mind. “I just bloody well better participate in keeping you alive, hadn’t I? Partner myself with your vampire mate and a bunch of witches, use every bit of magickal knowledge I’ve ever gleaned, for good or ill, break every rule I’ve ever agreed to keep—all of them by choice, anyway—to do it; because it’s all a choice, what we do. What face we wear, which laws we keep to and which we discard, and why.” 

She knew that. She did that every day, since Spike; but she had never thought in a million years that  _ Giles _ , of all people, would ever remotely understand. But here he sat, saying exactly that. That he was negotiating the same territory within himself… for her. For her and her vampire, and for what they had built here, with the help of their friends.

Giles gave a little nod, then. Pinched the bridge of his nose, then firmly replaced his glasses, as if he had decided something. “Because once I throw my lot in with you, I’ve announced myself a thoroughgoing traitor to the conservative cause, and they won’t ever have me back. There’ll be no more bellying up to the Council coffers or playing both sides, for either of our benefit, after this.”

/Oh, wow./

“We few, we happy few, we band of buggered,” Spike announced into the resultant silence.

Buffy jumped when Giles barked out a stark-sounding laugh. “Quite.”

Okay, but that was  _ their _ bonding, and for all of her they could quote random old crap at each other all night. Probably that one was Shakespeare—Buffy was starting to get the hang of which ones sounded Shakespeare-y—but she didn’t care, as long as they were good with each other. What she cared about was that both of her guys actually  _ were _ okay with each other, because that meant that neither of them would ever have to leave because of the other one.

And also? She needed to hug Giles, stat. “Get up Giles.”

He looked nonplussed for a moment at her demand, then came to his feet. “Buffy, what…” And grunted when she flung herself into his arms. 

“You were  _ always _ on my team,” she told him fiercely, while he was still busy trying to figure out the awkward business of how to fit his arms around her furious hug, and probably how to keep breathing. “I’ll let them take you away from me over my dead body. And we’ll figure it out. We’ll figure everything out. And I love you  _ so _ much!”

His hands slowed, dropped to stroke up and down her back. “I love you a very great deal as well, Buffy. I no longer care if it’s proper practice for a Watcher to feel this way about his charge. I honestly don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.”

He probably wouldn’t care if she cried on him a little, right?

“Girl’s not your Slayer or your charge, an’ you bloody well know it, Rupert. And you’re not her Watcher. You lot just like to use the bloody labels, same as we do, to keep things feeling civilized. Time you said it out loud, who she really is.”

Buffy wanted to throw something at Spike, hiss at him. It would break, if Giles said it. She could  _ lose _ it.

But instead Giles just stroked her hair, soothing. “My girl, my very dear girl. Don’t worry, Buffy. He may be something like good enough for my Slayer, but I think he still might be a bit of an imbecile.”

She snorted through tears, her face pressed against one tweedy button. And relaxed into the safety of her Watcher’s jacket.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
<3<3<3  
That summarizes my feelings on keeping Giles in good-dad-material land instead of his slowly turning into bad-dad Giles. Because that sucked.  
Hugs to all of you!


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize mightily for the delay; I lost all track of time, being stuck face-first, out of nowhere, in a Ripper/Rayne prequel story that dragged 30k out of me in 4 days. So sorry, so sorry. (Suffice it to say said prequel is currently ripping my soul out through my guts and leaving my heart bleeding on the floor, and possibly removing my will to live.)
> 
> Also also, damn these two. I haven't even finished this story yet, and they wheedled me into writing a sequel to this sequel. A short one, luckily for my sanity... but somehow they (and rabid plot-bunnies) attacked and would not for the life of me let go of the concept that an established-relationship version of OMWF was an EXCELLENT idea. So, um... y'all have that nonsense to look fwd to after this ridiculous monster finally wends its way to completion... whenever the hell THAT happens (IF, that is, that ever happens, because this train shows no signs of stopping thus far, fair warning).
> 
> So, this chapter contains a little more than the normal level of that back-and-forthing I do with time, skipping in and out of a couple of days to recount some conversations that were had over Giles' acquiring the Magic Box. Twinkles says it is 'followable' with a minimum of insanity. Hopefully that's true and I don't lose too many peeps.
> 
> Also, there's a fun episode rewrite bit in here, with some canon stuff and a few lines adapted from... Eh. Whichever one it is. Probably 'No Place Like Home'. (I've gotten so deep into this canon rewrite that it's all rearranged and blended in my head and I've kind of forgotten when things actually happened by now, eee.)

Buffy wasn’t really feeling this vamp. She and Spike had already straightened out that one stupid brawl at Willy’s tonight. On top of that, Giles had had her helping out with the setup of the new magicks shop basically every free moment she wasn’t patrolling or doing homework for the past two weeks. It was seriously cutting into her sex life. **** She would really much rather be feeling an entirely other vamp, and in an entirely other way right now, than wasting time with this soon-to-be-pile-of-dust. 

Apparently Spike was of the same mind. “Just do ‘im quick, Slayer, there’s a love. Tosser’s an out-of-towner. He’s got no protection.”

“What the hell do you think I’m…” Buffy cut off and ended in a grunt as she flew back to slam up against some sign that proclaimed they were verging on ‘Private Property, no trespassing, violators…’ yadda. Chain link rattled all around her as she made contact. 

The burly bastard loomed over her as she pushed off of the fence. “I’ve always wanted to kill the Slayer,” he announced, as if he could even come close to taking  _ that _ title.

Spike snorted disparagingly from where he leaned back against the fence playing the part of avid viewing public. “You’re  _ really _ not her type, wanker,” he offered casually.

Biker-vamp’s head swung around, distracted. Buffy favored him with a right cross to keep him looking Spike’s way.

It got his attention instead. He swung back to face her, snarling, and retaliated with a brutal uppercut that would have sent her reeling if she hadn’t spent the last year honing her reflexes against a much faster vampire. Instead, he barely clipped her forehead as she ducked, and whooshed by mostly harmlessly to mess up her cute hairdo. 

“Oi! You gonna let him get away with that, pet?”

Cheerleading, it was not. “Kinda busy here, honey.” Blocking another potshot, Buffy caught the idiot’s arm and used his momentum to wrench it behind his back. Ducked behind him, flattened him against the fence.

“That’s my girl.”

The dope against the fence struggled to get free. “Oh, sit still, or I’ll stake you.” Blowing her remaining wisps of bangs out of her eyes—reason number seventeen that she was growing them out to tie-back-able length—Buffy turned to her guy and did her best flashy eyes.  _ “Should  _ I just stake him, you think? Save time?”

“Fine by me. I’ve got enough customers round these parts, innit?”

She seriously considered it. It would end the night so much faster, and she could really use a good, hard, fast slay. “Word’ll get around, though…” she admitted regretfully. 

Cue more struggling. She slammed the jerk harder against the fence and cranked his arm up high enough that his shoulder popped threateningly. He made a high, keening noise and started wheezing. “Stop interrupting. I’m in the middle of a conference, okay?”

“I bloody well love you, Slayer.”

Buffy braced herself on her back leg and leaned forward harder into Biker-vamp’s bent arm, dug her elbow into what used to be his kidney. “You’re just saying that to get into my pants.”

“No, but it’s a nice side-benefit.”

“What  _ is _ this?” Biker-vamp was clearly bewildered by their repartee.

“Shut your gob. The grownups are talking. So. Figure, dinner after this, then a nice shag. I found this great little hidden-away place in an alley behind that Shoe Barn of yours you love so soddin’ much, does French food. You’d get off on it. Then I could get off on you…”

“You talk a good game,” Buffy allowed, then frowned at her captive’s dirty nape. “Though I’m suspicious about the alley part…”

“You eat somethin’ they call food at the Bronze all the bloody time, cockroaches an’ the lot.”

“Fair.” She turned back to her struggling wannabe nemesis. “Just have to figure out what to do with stinky here, first…” 

Stinky didn’t want to be figured out by such a strange duo, it seemed, for he donkey-kicked back at her, did a backward head-butt, got loose enough to swing one arm free of her grasp, and danced away, panting. “See, look. You distracted me with all your fancy French food talk.”

“Need to meditate more, Slayer.”

“You’re an asshole.” Buffy circled her opponent, eyeing him. The vamp looked freaked and cornered.

“Smooth talker, though.”

Buffy didn’t bother to reply, since that part at least was very true. Most of her attention was on her combatant, now feinting to the left and to the right.

Which was a good thing, since right about then, he pounced. 

Ready for it, she knelt, caught him midair, threw him into the fence. Eyebrow quirked, Spike stepped casually aside to avoid being hit by two hundred pounds of solid vampire as the flying monster sailed in his direction. Biker-vamp struck with a clatter, bounced off. He was up and roaring in an instant, fighting spirit back, driving in for the kill. /Aaaand, here we go!/

“Knew you wanted to play, love. Could’ve just said. And here I thought you wanted it over quick so we could get back to what we were doing…”

She traded a series of kicks with the snarling, spitting vamp and rolled her eyes in her guy’s general direction. “You know, you could always jump in here and make this go faster, instead of bitching. Lay down the vamp law and all that crap, Mr. Master-of-Sunnydale…”

She ducked a wild punch, got in one of her own. The idiot in the leather vest staggered back. Buffy glanced past him in time to see her mate and partner staring at her in a great show of comical innocence, hand to his chest. “I wouldn’t dream of interfering, pet. Know if you don’t get in at least one good slay a day, you’re a soddin’ mess, and there’s hell to pay for yours truly…”

Buffy rolled her eyes gamely and connected with another straight punch to the oncoming vamp’s jaw. “Oh, sure, make it sound like I have some kind of Slayer PMS, when we both know you just need to put out, and I…”

“Listen,” their guest star broke in finally, hands held up. He started to back away. “Don’t kill me if I insult you by… by implying… But it just seems like…” His eyes darted from one to the other of them. “Did I get in the middle of something, back there? Because if I did, I’ll just show myself out.”

Spike uncrossed his arms and pushed away from the chain link with his elbows. “Yeah, actually, you did. You interrupted a fine old snogging session, and you know it. Got the Slayer’s blood hot an’ then brassed her right off. Can’t expect her to be happy about it…”

The new vamp’s game face slid away to reveal kind of a chubby-looking, simple countenance. The raised hands dropped in confusion. “Look. I honestly wasn’t thinking. I saw a couple making out. Thought, you know, easy meal. I didn’t figure…” 

“Yeah. Noticed that,” Buffy put in, tapping her stake on her hand. “Not the smartest move in this town.”

“But who  _ would _ , you know? I figured I had to be wrong, when… When you turned out to be… Thought maybe you were playing tricks and you were about to stake him, or…” He shook his head, eyes bulging. “I mean… You’re… You’re a Slayer. And he’s… He’s…” 

Buffy sighed heavily. This was basically the standard reaction. It had gotten routine, and frankly tiring. “And he’s a vampire, and the town’s Master; yes, we know. Actually, it’s been really good for business. And,” she pointed out, fairly enough, “you’d think if you were a remotely decent hunter, you’d’ve noticed only one heartbeat; or at least smelled the vamp on him and felt the Slayer on me before you decided to make me into a snack…”

The hands came back up. “Fair enough. You’re so right. Look, I fucked up. Major. I was being an idiot. Not my turf, not my rules. Look; I’ll just leave town. That cool?”

Buffy rubbed the thumb-knuckle of her stake-hand over her forehead. Here’s where things got dicey. “You can stay.” /Understatement./ “Mostly because I can’t let you leave undusty…”

The vamp cringed. She lifted her eyes to pin him with her Slayer’s gaze. “Hear me out. See, here’s my ethical issue. We have… not a dry town going here, but one with some pretty strict rules. Except they’re  _ really _ not as strict as they used to be.” She waved her free hand wearily for Spike to take the floor. This part was his. He was, after all, Master.

Spike lifted his right hand, the back of his palm facing the newcomer. One finger was peeled outward, to be enumerated by the index finger of the left. “Rule one, you catch and release. No humans drained.”

Cue the incredulous. “What the…”

He was ignored by his intent fellow. “Don’t give a bloody damn if you manage it on your own recognizance, or you get regulars and take cash, get a blowie while you’re doin’ it; whatever the bloody hell you want. Long as the pulsers walk away still pulsin’. Two…”

“Do you know how much  _ work _ … How  _ often _ …”

Buffy punched the vamp directly in the face. “One and a half, shut the hell up when the Master’s talking, you numbnuts.”

The vamp reeled back dumbly, dark, spent blood gushing from his nose, to stare at her in amazement.

“Thanks, pet.”

“You bet, Sweetie.”

The dismayed demon’s stare turned from bewilderment to shock and horror, his mouth hanging agape. Spike didn’t wait around to let him regroup. “Two. You kill a pulser, I dust you, or the Slayer does. Flip of the coin; really only a matter of which of us gets to you first, or who’s feeling more put out about it that fine evening…”

“Usually me, unless Spike’s particularly pissed off about a vamp stepping all over his rules. Mostly because I need the exercise, and he likes watching me work. It turns him on.”

“There is that. Have you seen her? Christ.”

“This is unnatural.” Now their guest was starting to get seriously uncomfortable. 

“Sorry, mate; you’re right. Got off subject.” Spike held up a third finger, tapped it. “Rule three; and stick with me here, ‘cause this one’s the tough one here on the hellmouth. No sirin’ anyone. For some reason everyone’s mad to make baby vamps in this soddin’ burgh, but it’s all ‘love ‘em and leave ‘em’ around here; and then we’re stuck dustin’ the bleedin’ idiots, else we’d be overrun by the mindless little bastards. You make a fledge without permission—especially if you don’t take responsibility for the damn tosser—you both blow on the wind.” The long-fingered hand closed, dropped to a duster pocket. Rummaged. Came up with a lighter, shoved a cigarette between his lips. “See? Three easy rules.  _ Uno, dos, tres. Capisce?”  _ And, cupping his hands smoothly, he lit up. In the night, the hot coal of the new cigarette made the planes of his face look like an orange-tinted etching; like one of those paintings Mom was always talking about from the one period that sounded like a kind of button. Baroque. All dramatic and made up of dark and light and smooth textures.

He arrested her completely, sometimes.

The rando vamp also seemed arrested, but in a completely different way. A kind of numb, blank way. 

He didn’t look very  _ capisce-y. _ “I think the last-minute Spanish-Italian-switcheroo thing threw him, William,” Buffy offered quietly. “Maybe next time do the sales pitch without changing languages?”

“Oh, he understood, didn’t you, mate. So, what do you say? You wanna stay?” And Spike lowered his hand to his hip, eyes glittering, cigarette glowing. He looked, of course, as dangerous as he was, and every inch the Master vamp of her town. In juxtaposition with his vibe of casual lethalness held in vibrating check, the faint smell of the cigarette drifted to Buffy, irritatingly comforting because it meant  _ Spike _ . And it was unfair how sexy he made that whole stupid smoking thing look. Just as a side-note. Not that her mouth had gone dry or anything, because it hadn’t. Familiarity and contempt and… stuff. 

Well, not contempt. Immunity. It was immunity. 

“Uh, that’s all very… Look. Why don’t I just leave, and we can all live and let live, and….” Biker-vamp was already sidling off away between them in a kind of awkward, chap-wearing crab-walk.

Off of Spike’s expectant look, Buffy remembered it was her turn to jump back into the conversation. /Oh. Right./ “Sorry, no can do,” she informed him, stepping into his path. She planted herself there, legs akimbo and fists planted on her hips. Cocked her head to the side, smiled at him with the Combination-Sweetness-and-Death-Look. “See, this is the unseen rule four. Sort of a proviso on the former, ‘you exist, you dust’ rule; which, by the way, used to be the only rule. We’ve amended the above so that vamps can continue to exist, within the boundaries of Sunnydale only, if they play by our rules. But once you leave these borders, the old rules snap right back into place. And the old rules… are really just the one rule. Which is all about making you not exist, because I can’t trust you…”

“Trust…”

“If you’re not under my watchful Slayer-y eye, or Spike’s.” She snapped her fingers twice, sharply, in his face. “C’mon, guy, keep up. Seriously; do you think I’m just gonna let you leave here and go around snacking on people who are dumb enough to make out in alleys at night because they don’t know vamps exist, because you’re too dumb to realize that you’d last longer in the world if you  _ didn’t _ drain everyone?” Buffy went sober… and cold as she had ever been. “So here’s where you decide whether you’d rather keep existing as a nice, tractable version of a vampire, all amped on hellmouth juice, but with provisos… or if you wanna try to escape and see if you can beat my handy throwing arm.” She offered a nonchalant little shrug. “Who knows? You might be lucky today.”

“Oh, Christ, Slayer, was that your version of Clint Eastwood?”

“No. He’s all surly. I’m bubbly and cute.”

Spike leaned back again to survey her under approving brows. Nodded once. “You are at that.” 

“C… Can I have time to think about it?”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “I so don’t have time for this. I want to get back to that whole plan of ours. The one where he was about to screw me into the wall of that building over there, and then take me to someplace French.”

“Like the way your mind works, Slayer.”

Gaze briefly drawn to her mate, Buffy shrugged philosophically. “Well, I hardly ever get to kill anything anymore.” She pouted. “There’re all these diplomatic downsides.”

“The night is young, love. Look. You’re getting what you wanted.” Spike pointed with his chin. “Tosser’s doing a runner.”

Buffy grinned and whirled. “Oh, goody.” Breaking into a pursuit-lope and drawing back her hand as she did so, she took quick, careful aim. Sighted along the stake. And threw.

A moment or two later she was coming back around the corner, dusting her hands. “So, anyway, where _ were _ we?”

“Along about here, innit?” Spike asked, and tugged her in against his lithe frame, one arm banding tightly against the small of her back to pin her hips to his.

“That,” Buffy agreed heartily against his lips, “feels about right.”

“So,” he murmured, and tossed aside his half-smoked cigarette, “how are we really feelin’ about a shag in the warehouse district?”

‘Against the wall of a random industrial building’ had not yet entered their repertoire, but there was clearly a first time for everything. After all, aside from the now-dusty out-of-towner, no one was around. “I might be able to be convinced. If, you know, you make it worth my wh…”

Out of nowhere, a bright light shone in their faces, and someone barked a “Hey!”

Buffy whirled, automatically fumbling for the backup stake she had stowed in the inside breast pocket of her long, stylish, faux-fur coat. 

“At ease, love,” Spike rumbled at that spot under her ear, calming her jangling nerves. “Just some sort of security prat.”

“Listen,” a man in a nondescript uniform announced, drawing closer, “If you two are here for one of those rave-parties, you’re a little late. I chased a bunch of kids out of here last night.” He waved a vague hand toward the warehouse on the other side of the chain-link, flashlight bobbing. When the light returned he narrowed his eyes at Spike, frowned. “Or are you looking for some sort of… garage-band… hard rock…”

“More of a Punker,” Spike overrode him casually; without, it must be said, remotely loosing his hold on Buffy’s butt. “Have to wear too much bloody rainbow gear to get invited to a soddin’ rave, an’ that lot are always coked up to the gills on some sort of mood drug. Give me plain, old-fashioned hard liquor and harder music any night of the week…” He gave Buffy a little tug, ass-first, against his hard length, making her shiver imagining what his energy would be like in some kind of rando, lowbrow warehouse rock show down here. She inhaled sharply. “...The more cockroaches, the better,” he finished, completely ruining her brief sexual fantasy, and let her pull away to glance around them, as if seeking for echoes of drums and bad singing. “Anything like that goin’ on around here of late?”

Standing beside him now and somewhat recovered of equilibrium, Buffy poked him lightly in the ribs to remind him not to overplay it. “He promised to take me to a real, underground rock show. Said the best ones are always in warehouses.” /And maybe, just maybe, we can actually do that sometime?/ For some reason, she now found herself filled with a bright interest in dingy, bad-music rock shows. 

How different could it be, really, than the Fumigation Party at the Bronze? 

Security Guy smiled slightly; just the corners of his mouth. “Ah, young love. Well. Sorry to disappoint, but haven’t seen anyone traipsing through with guitars lately.” The smile faded and he shook his head. “Honestly, if it was my call I’d let the kids do shows, have raves, whatever in here. It’s not like anybody’s using this place for anything, right?” A weary shrug. “But they don’t pay me enough to argue with the boss, so…”

Buffy grabbed her surly vampire’s arm. Time to go find somewhere else to make out. “We understand. We’ll look somewhere else. I’m sure there’s an event happening somewhere around here… C’mon, Sweetie.”

She dragged him around, still half-amused and half-irritated, and they headed back to their interrupted patrol-route. And were halted by another call-out from Security Guy. “Oh, hey. Hold on, Miss. You forgot your… glow-ball?”

Buffy froze, a  _ frisson _ of sheer, awed amazement slamming into her full force. She felt its echo in her mate, rooting them both to the spot with the massive shock of deja vu. 

Spike beat her to the punch, swinging around sharply. “What the hell did you say?” he demanded, just this shy of bursting into game-face.

Security Guy, half bent over to pick up something glowing, yellowish, and round, stared up in growing horror at this abruptly menacing figure. Which was fair. Most people, when struck right between the eyes with the full power of an elder vampire undimmed, tend to be cowed. This guy was no exception. He was frozen in place like a rabbit, stammering. “Thi… I thought… Isn’t it… yours? I figure you dropped…”

“Spike,” Buffy intervened, and stepped between them to lay a forestalling hand on his arm. She got it. She was just as wigged. But… “Thank you. So silly of me to have dropped it. He’s just being grumbly. He bought it for me, and it cost a pretty penny. Probably he’s mostly mad that I was careless with it…”

Spike tried to dial his expression down from ‘ready to fang out’ to ‘surly’. Buffy didn’t think it helped Security Guy much. “Uh, yeah. Sure. Here you go. Uh, could you two go now? It’s… not really a… safe neighborhood.”

“Already gone.” Grabbing Spike’s arm, Buffy dragged him into a turn and away. 

He fell into step with her, staring down at the glowing bauble in her hands as they made for the main drag. “You think…” he breathed.

“I dunno.” She felt as mesmerized by the amber deal as he looked. It was always a hell of a mind-fuck to run face-first into the real thing after you’d dreamed it in the Slayer-scape. Buffy, as per the usual, felt very whammied and slow of thought. “But I think we should take it to Giles. Pretty much now.”

“Yeah. Patrol’s climaxed and gone into its highlight reel, I’d imagine,” he agreed, and, absently taking her arm, lifted his head to survey the lamp-lit streets. “Guess this means no French restaurant.” His regretful tone and the new side-by-side posture signaled the change from ‘business partners’ to ‘couple-status’, with a touch of, ‘so much for our date, sorry love’.

She dragged her eyes away from the glowy-thing with an effort to catch his gaze. “Sorry, William,” she murmured the endearment softly. “I’ll eat unpronounceable things in front of you another night and let you laugh at me for thinking a pigeon egg is a kind of rare, high-priced foreign car or something; I promise.” 

His lips twitched with the returning edges of unwilling good humor. “Holdin’ you to that.”

***

Giles wasn’t at his apartment. They tried the new store next. He’d been working late a lot the last few days, specifically because that was when he didn’t have to trip over Xander and the other contractor types who were helping with the remodel at bargain-basement prices (Xander had luckily gotten him the hookup). He was desperate to get things prepped and the inventory set up and to start turning a profit ASAP, before the concept of a ‘magic’ shop downtown dropped out of everyone’s collective consciousness. Also, he had confessed to Anya and Buffy’s mom that he needed to recoup some of his expenditures fast before he ran out of regular-life money. Apparently he hadn’t really figured in things like paying off the City to look over the plumbing and wiring and asbestos levels and all this other stuff that no one ever was told was part of the process when a storefront changed hands and you wanted to move things around. He’d been prepared for things like permits and licenses, but there were, Buffy was learning through the grapevine, a whole bunch of hidden costs that came with opening a business. She was learning about them now whether she wanted to know them or not, to the tune of loud, repeated, shocked moans... and how had Mom done all this without Buffy ever having realized it was a thing, when they’d first moved here? 

Her mother had made it all seem like nothing to get the gallery going, when no doubt there had been all these same kinds of other rigmarole and fees. She had even done a tiny remodel. And yet, silence. Mom had just plugged along and made her business a modest success, and wow. /I guess I never really gave her the credit she deserves for building up and holding down a business and dealing with me and Dawn and… and all of it./

Anyway, it turned out Giles was actually really indebted to Xander for keeping the contractor-costs to a minimum, or he might’ve spent next month eating peanut butter and, far worse, using Lipton tea bags (which was, Buffy had been told repeatedly by two Englishmen over the course of the last few years, a fate significantly worse than mere death). “I badly need this investment to pay off,” Giles had informed Anya yesterday, and then lifted his eyes to Mom. “Joyce, how in the name of God do you manage this sort of stress on a daily basis?” 

Mom had patted him on the arm, all beatific, slightly smug smiles. “Just keep breathing, Rupert. This is the scary part. The ‘it’ll work or I’ll have bankrupted myself’ leap of faith. Just ask yourself… what’s the worst that can happen?”

“He’ll actually go bankrupt, have no provable source of income or employment in this country, have his visa revoked, and be deported back to England, too far away from Buffy to be any good to her,” Anya had put in, ever the blunt and helpful person.

“Well,” Mom had answered into the resounding silence, “I guess I hadn’t thought of that. If my business fails I’ll just have to go back to work as a secretary or something demeaning like that.” Shaking her head once briskly, she’d turned back to Giles, a strangely hard expression on her face. “Well, then, I guess we better make sure yours doesn’t, huh? Since Buffy depends on you?”

Giles had looked nauseous.

Later on, Buffy had come around the corner from the stairway at Revello in time to hear Mom muttering low to Spike. She had sounded floored. “When I let him off the hook for the whole hoarding money business, I never realized he could get  _ deported _ if the venture fails. I mean… What was he  _ thinking? _ How that man could take a risk like this, knowing how much Buffy fears being deserted by a father-figure, is beyond me. Ugh; Rupert, I could  _ smack _ you.”

/Okay, nice to know everyone on the planet thinks I have major daddy-issues…/

Actually, though, Mom’s reaction to the whole thing was kind of blowing Buffy’s mind. Buffy had pulled her mother and Spike aside at the gallery to talk it out with both of them before dinner. Best to get it all out before it became a thing, right? So she had informed them of how the conversation with her Watcher had gone… or, at least, about the part that had gone down after Spike had stormed out of the shop. 

Mom had started out just as offended as Spike had been by Giles’ investment and where the funds had come from. Buffy had had to override them both, really, to let them know how she felt about the whole thing. 

To her surprise, Spike had accepted her acceptance, for the most part. Probably because he basically unlived and died to be the epitome of ‘supportive partner’. Mom, though, had nodded, muttered something about having a talk with ‘that man’, and promptly exited the gallery to leave it in Anya’s capable hands for an hour or so. When she had returned, she had looked grim and satisfied.  _ “You’re right, Buffy. He has money put aside for you; and lucky for him he’s invested it fairly well.”  _ A hard note had entered her voice.  _ “And from here on out, you’ll see an accounting for that every quarter. You’ll have access to those investments, and a voice in how they’re apportioned. If you want to withdraw anything from them, for any reason, you’ll be able to.”  _ She’d gone all firm and terrifying, then. _ “And now that you’re a legal adult, Giles will keep you involved in any further financial conversations pertaining to the slaying, his pay, your portion of it, and other related matters which touch on your life or decisions this Council of his makes which might impact you in any way whatsoever.” _

Buffy honestly hadn’t been sure she’d wanted that much disclosure, even if she knew it was practical and logical that she should know about all that murky crap. _ “O…okay. Thanks, Mom.” /I think./  _ No way she would have said anything like, ‘But no thanks.’ Not when Mom was on a tear like this. No way in hell.

With a stiff, fulminating nod, Mom had turned back to the counter.  _ “So, Anya, any customers while I was gone?” _

When they had seen Giles the next afternoon, he had looked significantly shaken.  _ “So, ah… I enjoyed a brief visit from your mother today.”  _ Looking down at his hands, which seemed uncharacteristically aimless in their traverse over the edges of the currently-homeless glass countertops of the magic shop, he’d pursed his lips and winced a little, his crows-feet deepening briefly. _ “She’s a… formidable woman.” _

/Eee./ Mom had really laid into her Watcher, then.  _ “She, uh… I told her what you said, and what we…” _

Giles had held up a hand, meeting her eyes squarely.  _ “You don’t need to protect me, Buffy. I made a decision which, in retrospect, was possibly a very poor one. Your mother and I hashed it out cleanly, and I think we’ve cleared the air well enough between us. You and I should, of course, go aside at some point and look at the materials pertaining to your investments, and other ephemera regarding the Watchers Council…”  _ He stumbled slightly. _ “I’d thought, considering your propensity to avoid the standard Slayer homework that I was helping you by withholding… But I see now that that was patronizing and that I was keeping you in the dark, and in effect rendering you still a dependent child without the skills or information necessary to navigate the world in which you must exist, perhaps someday without my guidance. That was unconscionable of me, and I apologize for the oversight…” _

_ “Giles,”  _ she’d breathed, now incredibly uncomfortable.

He’d shaken it off.  _ “Be that as it may, we shall carry on from here and rectify matters.” _

_ /Ow./ “Giles, I don’t know anything about… investments, or… finances, or… capital anything…” _

_ “I’ll help you figure it all out, pet.” _

Buffy had turned to stare at her lover, amazed. He had remained silent till now; and what a time to speak up!  _ “You…” _

_ “Had to manage mine and Dru’s money, didn’t I?”  _

_ “Manage…”  _ The concept of vampires like those two having money to ‘manage’ was really one Buffy couldn’t hold in her head. Not even a little bit. Hadn’t they just… stolen what they needed from the people they ate and lived from one corpse to the next?

Spike’s lips had twisted slightly, and his voice took on a bitter cast as he looked into the past.  _ “She couldn’t’ve managed even if she wasn’t mad, since women from her time weren’t taught figures. Though, ‘spose she could’ve learnt it easily enough. She was bright as all hell; but after what was done to her... Didn’t even bother to strip the bodies, much less to make an accounting. That was all on me. Did we want something nice; to do, to see, to buy passage on a steamer without bringin’ too much attention on ourselves or what-have-you…” _

/Oh./ Yes, Buffy supposed it would have been important sometimes to lay low. 

A faint shrug.  _ “And, of course, before that I watched Angelus manage mine, what he and the old bent bitch took over for the Line; for all the bloody good it did before the dozy old cunt and the git blew it all in like it was soddin’ water. And before that…”  _ A one-shouldered shrug _. “…I did for my own family, since I was the only living male heir.” The corners of his mouth twitched up, expressive as ever while he watched Buffy’s probably stunned parade of expressions. “Not that I was all that clever about figures. Wasn’t quick with maths at all, really; was always better at languages. Got caned fair regular for failing at my sums as a lad; but you get on with it anyway if it’s what’s needful; an’ it was by then.”  _

Then his eyes did that thing again where he went far away, into the past.  _ “Mum did the best she could for years, since Da died when I was but eight or nine, but she was in the same bloody boat as Dru. Women weren’t taught accounting an’ the like, yeah? Just to catch a husband to do it all for ‘em, so she had to rely on a discreet butler to help us till I grew up enough to manage. By the time I was capable of takin’ it on we had the bloody lot of debts—medical an’ the like, and just plain mistakes and wear—never really recovered.”  _ With a quick shake of his head, he was back, a faint smile on his lips for Buffy.  _ “Still, know a bit about how it works, and nowadays you’ve calculators an’ the lot, which saves you puttin’ the whole bloody thing in the red with a mistake in the ‘rithmatic, innit, like in my day.”  _

After a long moment in which Buffy simply stared at him, and Giles along with her, _ “What? Did I come down with a case of spots or summat?”  _ he’d demanded, abruptly harsh.

Buffy had shaken her head once in negation and, with a faint smile, lifted her hand to touch his cheek.  _ “It’s just, sometimes I forget that you had this whole other crazy life, and that I don’t even know that guy, and it’s like, ‘who are you?’” _

The harshness dropped away, and the blue eyes warmed. _ “The man you mated, all wrapped up in the vamp who’s lived through the years since, is all, pet.” _

_ “Oh. Right. Well, I know  _ him _. _ ” __ /And, oh my God, do I love him./

Giles had broken in quietly then, looking oddly triumphant and with a faint smile of his own playing over his lips.  _ “Putting aside my now desperate wish to interview you, Spike, should I promise never, under any circumstances, to share those materials with the Council…”  _

_ “No.” _

_ “And my insistence that I’m not above bribery...” _

Spike had stilled. _ “Now you’re speakin’ the right language, Watcher. How much?” _

_ “That’s another conversation entirely, old man. But to move away from the digression; Buffy, you should know that your mother also insisted that I make a few demands from the Council when and if they do arrive; chief among them that you receive a stipend for your work from here forward, in your own name, being as you’re now an adult living under your own recognizance. Of course, we all know how wildly unlikely this scenario is, but I want you to know that I will in fact attempt to broach the matter if you wish me to do so…” _

_ Buffy hesitated. Getting paid for slaying went against the entire ethos of the job. It was about the Calling. You were opted in. You didn’t opt. And being paid meant you could, like… choose. /Which I never would. Yeah, I’m planning on doing this DIY-style from here out, but I’m for sure not just gonna, like, quit. I have the ability to save and help people. I could never just sit by and watch someone get drained and say, ‘Well, they didn’t pay me today, so you’re on your own, buddy, sorry!’/ It was just… getting paid really would help with a lot of stuff someday. College wouldn’t last forever. Financial aid meant paying back financial aid, which meant jobs that paid money, and when could she do that without never sleeping, and… _

_ “Which I tried to tell her,”  _ Giles went on gently after a moment’s pause for her confusion.  _ “Unfortunately, I believe Joyce is always going to have difficulty grasping that dichotomy—and so are the Council, at the opposite end, who cannot fathom why I’m permitting you to have a life of your own which might require outside spending in the first place. Or why your mother should be so very angry that I couldn’t exactly find a way to slip her some monies to replace the clothing you unfortunately damaged in the line of duty for those years in which she was not in the know; a terrible strain on a single mother’s budget, to be sure.”  _

Yeah, there had been that. And the explaining of it. And one very pissed off mom, sometimes, with the coming home with acid-spotted, ichor-stained blouses, and… And yeah; it wasn’t like Giles could’ve just knocked on the door and handed Mom a fifty and said, “Hi, I’m the librarian from the school. Here’s some money from your daughter’s clothing stipend to replace her damaged ‘togs’. Can’t tell you why I have it or why she needs it. Cheerio, then.” /I guess that explains why there’s a whole backlog of money just sitting around./

Giles had peered down at his hands, looking weary, and maybe a little bit lost. _ “Buffy, I do want you to know that my purchase of this place is at least in part an effort to protect you, both as a young woman at least partially under my protection from those men, and as the Slayer. My intention was to offer us a front, if you will, and to ensure that if they should sever the false employment associations and documentation which keeps me here at your side, I can still remain to run interference for you with them. Especially given current circumstances, with Spike and the new order going on here in Sunnydale.”  _ He’d inhaled deeply.  _ “Which is why, despite the fact that I religiously avoided using even one penny of your monies in this investment, I have invited your mother—as well as Anya, though that is for other reasons—to be investors here…” _

That last jerked Buffy’s head up in amazement. _ “Wh…” _

_ “We have already seen that the gallery’s sources can cross paths with our interests on occasion. I think considering the flavor of this business,”  _ Giles went on evenly,  _ “we can find some mutual investment opportunities, share contacts, network, find some overlap… and Joyce has offered to afford me some of her hard-earned acumen with regard to the local small-business landscape, so that I might… I believe the term she used was ‘hook into’ the local merchant-class, with regard to events, networking, et cetera, so that I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. That will of course cover the human level, while working with Anya whenever she can be spared from the gallery will cover the demonic level. Which, one hopes, will also eventually be of mutual assistance to Joyce, by garnering her new customers and networking amid the demon businesses, et cetera. She might even find new investors, and she was intrigued at the idea of showcasing some demon artists…” _

Buffy was agape now. The idea of her mother featuring demon artists and getting in bed with demon investors was… /God, this is way worse than last year when she wanted to drive a Scooby getaway car, and…/

_ “Stop panicking, pet. She’s a part of this town, and she’s in the know. If this helps her to make a profit, why not?” _

_ “Because it makes her less safe, you idiot!”  _ Buffy snapped at her guy, incensed and terrified. 

Spike had remained, of course, unruffled by her panic.  _ “Her daughter’s the Slayer and her son-in-law’s the Master. She’s safe as houses… or she’s already a target. And this is  _ Sunnydale _ , love. Pretending it’s not to do business with only half the town is actually rather bleedin’ stupid, innit? If you’re a businessperson? And Joyce is nothing if not a practical woman.” _

_ “But… But what if…”  _

Spike’s voice went tight at her. _ “She’s not asking for your permission, Buffy. She’s a grown woman. If you want her to respect your decisions as you make your way in a dangerous world, you’ve got to do the same for her…” _

_ “But this is  _ my _ world, not hers!” _

_ “And she wants to be a part of it.” _

_ “No!” _

_ “Spike is right,” Giles had interrupted stolidly. “In any case, she’s already gotten four new commissions that she thinks exceedingly promising, and that merely on the strength of today’s conversation between her, myself, and Anya. And since both of these businesses do, in the end, ultimately exist to benefit you, Buffy, as well as Dawn, and to expand your future prospects, I should think you ought to accept the good with the bad and smile.” _

By then Buffy had been floundering up to her shoulders.  _ “Wh…” _

Giles’ eyes on hers were immovable.  _ “You and Faith are, in fact, my sole beneficiaries. I suppose it’s time I mentioned it. So one hopes this shop will, in fact, prosper.” _

_ /Sole…/ “I…”  _ She felt kind of like she had been slapped in the face with something heavy and wet. Right between the eyes _. _

_ “In the meantime,”  _ he rode briskly past her stunned confusion _ , “Anya’s involvement in both businesses will no doubt help to make the shop profitable. The woman has an uncanny ability to make even an ice cream wagon lucrative. And since she is already partners with Joyce, her presence here will make her an invaluable go-between if we are to be business partners of a sort in turn.”  _ Giles had offered her one of his quiet smiles.  _ “I should think it will all go over rather well, given a little time to settle.” _

_ “Well,”  _ Spike had murmured into the resultant, stunned silence, _ “not a bad day’s work, then.” _

_ “Indeed. Now, if I can only get this remodel done. I feel I’ve spent the last three days with moldering, old sawdust in my nostrils. I look forward to going to bed some night soon without smelling carpentry glue.” _ _   
_

Outside, later, Buffy had sat, overwhelmed and amazed and really kind of brain-numb, in the DeSoto.  _ “What even just happened in there, Spike? What’s happening to the world of my life?” _

He’d chuckled, the jerk. _ “I’d say the streams have irrevocably crossed, pet, and thing’s’ll never be the same again.” _

_ “Tell me something I don’t know, you doofus.” _

_ There was a moment of silence, then, “Ever notice that I call you ‘love’, and ‘pet’, and ‘sweetheart’, and you call me ‘dope’, and ‘idiot’, and ‘jerk’…” _

_ “And William’,”  _ she’d reminded him softly, staring at his profile, the strong line of his jaw.  _ “Investing? Really?” _

With a little, dismissive shake of his head, he’d leaned forward to start the car. _ “Slayer, you do know that your mum’s a bloody powerhouse, yeah?” _

_ “Yeah,”  _ Buffy had answered softly, awed. _ “Somehow I really missed just how much.” _

Standing at the foot of the stairs listening to Mom vent about Giles, Buffy could only marvel at her mother... and to be amused, of course, at Spike’s usual willingness to cheer on any Summers who wanted to get all rowdy. “If you decide to go rounds with Watcher, Joyce, I have one request. Let me watch, yeah, if you love me?”

Mom’s voice had cleared into faint amusement. “Spike, why is it that you are such a huge fan of watching Buffy, or apparently me, get angry and belligerent? I’m sitting here spitting like a cat, and you’re glowing at me like I’ve given you a present.”

“Like watchin’ Niblet get all feisty and try to smack idiot boys over the head with notebooks as well. What can I say, Joyce? Summers women feelin’ their power, tellin’ the world and fool men how it’s to be? Headiest drug on the market. An’ here I am with a front-row seat.”

Buffy swore she could hear her mom roll her eyes. “Flatterer. I’ve spent my life being told I need to be a lady and sit on my temper. I feel incredibly uncomfortable when I get this angry…”

This pronouncement seemed to put her vampire’s back up. “Tosh,” he decried blandly. “You’re a potential Slayer; or were, before you aged out. I’d lay money on it. That fire is your birthright, and the world tryin’ to quash you of it is a bloody crime.”

Buffy froze into a statue at the bottom of the stairs, her stomach wavering with a sudden, hollow shock. She had never even  _ considered _ that. / _ Mom? _ A… an expired  _ Potential? _ /

Mom, of course, was just as disbelieving. “Now I  _ know _ you’re trying to flatter me.” A short, pregnant pause. “Or scare me.”

Spike didn’t even come close to backing down. “I’ve never once lied to you, Mum, and you know it.”

A dull scrape of a mug being pushed across the table. “Oh, drink your cocoa.”

Right then, Mom had sounded so much like Buffy herself that it had kind of freaked her. And in that instant, and weighing all the other evidences in the past—they way they had always bumped heads, how incredibly similar their tempers were; all of it—Buffy was suddenly terrifyingly certain that Spike was right.

After all, he had kind of Slaydar. /Which is only fair, since he was probably sired by one, and oh, man…/

No wonder Mom had been able to bully Giles into changing everything about his business model and whatever. /Just wow./

It kind of made Buffy wonder if that was partially why her Watcher was working doubles and barely sleeping, trying to make this upcoming grand-opening a success. It was one thing if he just didn’t want to let Buffy herself down, or to be a failure in his own eyes, or go bankrupt and be deported. All of that was various kinds of ew-to-terrifying, and not just in the Land of Giles. But if he was so petrified of Mom that he was practically an overworked insomniac right now, then that was kind of a thing.

It might explain, though, why the guy was never home anymore. 

“Hey,” Buffy called as she and Spike breached the store, and pushed her head in through the back door to the wide, rear room with its bare, painted cinderblock walls. “Giles, you in here?” This was going to be the office area, she thought, and some other thing. Probably inventory storage or whatever. Except… over there was what looked like… an archery target, half-covered in a sheet?

/Okay, whatever./

“Get on in, love. If he’s not back here, he’s further in. Smell him.”

Buffy made a face. “Of course you do. He’s been in here twenty-four-seven lately. You’d smell him if he was in Borneo right now.” 

Spike scoffed as he followed her into the echoingly empty room and through the far door into the main part of the store. 

Her foot promptly slipped on sawdust, and she almost went down. Spike caught her under the armpits and righted her, because sometimes he was even faster than Slayer reflexes. “Careful, pet. Place is a bloody carnival funhouse right now.”

“That crap’s like stepping on fresh vamp-dust. Jeez.”

“Well, you have to keep wearin’ those idiot shoes without any tread…”

Buffy threw him a  _ look _ . “Big talk from the guy who almost drooled on his own feet when I put ‘em on this morning…”

“Well, you weren’t wearin’ the trousers then. When it’s a private show of just heels ‘n knickers, you can’t blame a man for…”

“Please, dear God, stop, for the love of all that’s holy.” And there was the man of the hour, popping out from behind the currently-mobile glass countertop like a jack-in-the-box. 

It always worked. It was second nature, by now. Talk about sex, and her Watcher would hem and haw and scurry and reveal his location almost instantaneously. “Hey, Giles. Why are you sitting here in the dark?”

Giles glanced around the room. Blinked. “When did it get so bloody dark?”

Spike snorted and strode swiftly over to the wall with the switch. “Here to tell you about this grand new invention, Rupert. They call it electricity. ‘S been all the rage since we stopped using the bloody gas lamp.” And he flipped on the lights.

Giles flinched away, hard, and flung his hand up to protect his vision. “Good Lord, I’ve gone blind.”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “I bet. It’s like…” She frowned at her watch. “…Nine-thirty. Did you just stop looking up or something?”

“Oh, well… yes. I was going over the bills for some of the new inventory, and deciding what I could safely afford to purchase for the opening, and balancing it out with the things Uncle Bob had left behind, and considering the permit fund, and…” He blinked blearily. “Half-nine? Really?”

“Yeah, we’ve already been out patrolling. Speaking of which, if you can stop being riveted by expense reports…” She dug into the messenger bag she’d looped on once they’d regained the DeSoto. Her homework and textbooks now lay unceremoniously dumped all over the floor of the car. “Guess what we found tonight?”

Giles blinked at the radiant little globe. “Buffy, what…”

“Now’s when you crack open the books and find that out, Watcher, bein’ as the Slayer and I recognize that bauble from our little foray into the desert a couple weeks back.”

Giles drew back slightly, then put out one curious finger. “Oh, surely not.”

Buffy bit her lip and glanced back at her co-dreamer. “Well, the thing in the dream was a lot more glowy. Like… it radiated all huge, right Spike? But this has to be it. It…  _ feels _ related, anyway. And the night watchman guy said the same thing he said in the dream when he handed it to us…”

Spike pulled out a cigarette. “Which was, let me tell you, one of the most unnerving bloody experiences of my sodding life, and I spent a hundred ‘n eighteen years with a mad, oracular vampiress who’s most likely an ex-Slayer. And I dare you to say that five times bloody fast.”

Giles shot Spike a sour look for the cigarette, but subsided without comment. “Well, given that, obviously it’s paranormal in origin…”

Spike snorted contemptuously. “Can tell that right off, can you Rupert?”

Buffy freed a hand to pat his bicep. “He’s just testy. He doesn’t like sudden shocks. And, you know, this other vamp was kind of coming on to me tonight…”

“How very rude.”

“He was from out of town. He learned the ropes.”

Giles leaned forward, hands held out for the glowy ball. “Dusted him, did you?”

“He was making improper advances. Saying he always wanted to kill a Slayer. Stealin’ my lines…”

“As if. Also, he was smelly, and he didn’t want to play by our rules. So… poof.”

“Wanker.” Spike jerked his chin at the ball. “What the bloody hell is it, Watcher?”

“No idea. But clearly it’s an object of enormous power…”

Buffy blinked. “What; is it, like… emanating witchy vibes, or…”

Giles lifted his gaze to her, face blank. “It’s so  _ shiny _ .”

Spike barked a dry laugh and stubbed out his cigarette on his boot, looking disgusted and as impatient as he’d looked since they’d first seen the thing. “Hark the expert.”

“Oh, shut it. It’s far too late for your brand of snark.”

Buffy felt a wave of astonishment roll over her like the tide. “Giles, you said ‘snark’! I’m so proud of you!”

He shot her a bland look. “Yes, well; hanging about with you lot of heathens is sure to leave its mark at some point. Where did it come from?”

Buffy gave him a quick rundown of the events of their truncated patrol, Spike chiming in here and there till the whole account was laid bare. 

“Makes one wonder, pet. May be more afoot where that came from, yeah? Think we ought to go back out again, see if we can figure out what’s on with that warehouse?”

Buffy frowned as she watched her Watcher run his hands thoughtfully over the ball. “Probably a good idea. Except if this has to do with our new big bad, maybe better if we know more first…”

“You mean look before we leap?” Spike interrupted, dry and edgy.

She gave him a little side-eye for his irascible, jumpy energy. “Yeah; you know, do a little planning…”   


“Need more information to do that.”

He had a point. But still… “Okay, but can we be a little careful about how we go collect our data? We have no idea yet what we’re dealing with…”

“You’re no fun sometimes, Slayer.”

That got her goat. It was too close to an old barb from Faith; even one from Spike. “I’m still alive,” she reminded him flatly.

He had the grace to wince. “Point,” he allowed, then sighed and relaxed a little from his thrumming high-wire of tension. “Guess we can wait till…” He frowned in his turn.  _ “…You _ can wait till daylight to check it out. I just hate like hell you goin’ without me.”

Giles jumped in then, one hand upraised. “I’d really rather you both hang back till I can ascertain just what this thing is. There’s nothing says we need to take immediate action.” 

They turned to him, amazed. Buffy opened her mouth to protest, the urgency of the dream beating at her mind. 

“I am all-too-aware that, this item having come to you, as it were, directly from the Slayer dream, it must feel rather imperative that you investigate its meaning immediately. But I assure you we can do that as well from a research capacity for now, so that you can head into the field in a more informed manner. I beg you the indulgence of a day, at least.”

Buffy crossed her arms over her furry coat and sighed heavily. She knew he was right. Giles and his research had sometimes been inaccurate… but it had always been better than no 411 at all. “Fine.” Reaching out, she caught Spike’s duster sleeve between her fingers. “You. Me. Dorm. I have class at eight. If I don’t get my fancy French dinner, I still expect  _ something _ French before I crash.”

Predictably, her vampire was diverted. “Right, then,” he answered, turning toward her like a hunk of iron toward an electromagnet. His arms uncrossed to fall to his sides, and his eyes did that thing where they went incredibly blue and all twinkly. “Off we go.”

/If we don’t get to patrol and act on all this anxiety, then we might as well burn it off. Because otherwise, neither of us is gonna get any rest, worrying about it./ “See you later, Giles.”

For a wonder, Giles didn’t even complain about the blatant innuendo-ing. He just waved his free hand at them as if shoving them vaguely toward the door with the power of Air. “Yes. Yes. See you tomorrow, after your classes. I’ll get on researching this… item in the interim...”

“Say one thing for the bloke,” Spike informed her neck before they even made it to the car, “he’s got the right kind of focus for a scholar.” And he slapped her butt impudently. “Hop in, love. I’ve designs on your person.”

She regarded him with daggers in her eyes, one hand on the passenger door. “You do know that if anyone else on this planet ever did that, they’d be dead right now… and even you are very close to cruising for a staking.”

He grinned as he strolled around the DeSoto. “I like to live dangerously.” And he ducked in.

She followed, glaring. Opened her mouth…

“You’re so bloody gorgeous when you’re brassed…”

“I could kill you in your sleep.”

He started the car without remotely tearing his eyes from her. “Know it, pet. ‘S what makes this fun.” 

/Oh my God./ “You are so incredibly lucky you’re hot and good in bed.”

He smirked and rolled his tongue, shot a way-too-brief glance at the road, and pulled away from the curb. “Whatever keeps you from stakin’ me and my tongue in your quim is a clear sign of some god’s favor, bestowed in my youth…”

“Before they found out you were going to be a smug-ass…”

His grin broadened. “What they don’t know won’t hurt ‘em. Means they won’t rescind their favors.”

/Oh jeez./ “You better impress me tonight, or I might rescind mine.”

He snorted his opinion of that likelihood. “No, you won’t. You can’t hold out against me. You’d last five minutes.”

/Oh, is that a challenge?/

Out of nowhere he stopped the car, turned to her, eyes abruptly entreating. “It sounds a fun game, pet, but don’t put us through it. You’d lose, and you’d be incredibly angry both for the losin’ and because you’re not meant to be celibate. Not especially with so few demons about of late askin’ to be put out of it. Just leave it at you want me and I want you and let’s go shag, yeah?”

She exhaled hard through her nose, wanting to fight about it just on principle’s sake, but… He was probably right. Considering that all he really had to do was stand in front of her and she was ready to jump on him sometimes, the thought of trying to hold out if he was actively trying to seduce her sounded like a torturous enterprise. “Fine. Whatever. Just get us there, and then shut up and let me drive you crazy.”

He lifted a brow as he set the car into motion again. “Was all set to drive you crazy first, but whatever way you wanna play it, Slayer.”

Honestly, she thought they’d probably end up against the wall the minute they got inside the room tonight, but whatever. She just wanted to stop freaking, and she thought he did too; hence all the stupid, banter-y sniping. “Are you worried?” she heard herself ask softly into the silence.

He sobered as he turned onto Campus Drive. “Buffy, can I just shag us both blind and not talk about that sodding thing? Just for tonight? Because even thinking about it is gutting me.”

She had thought that meant depressing him, but maybe it also meant the same thing as a wiggins.

Good to know they were pretty much always on the same page. “Deal.”

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
So, now we're finally on THAT train!


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I owe a lot of replies again. eee.  
> I'll get on that asap. Meantime...  
> Time to really start to get into the meat of S5, for better or worse.

The vampire she was staking had turned into a gerbil, which was really rude, because she was kind of enjoying the idea of staking a vamp who looked like… Was it Milli or Vanilli? She had never gotten the skinny on which one was which, but it still bothered her that they hadn’t just let the guys who really did the singing keep on with the music so she could keep fangirling over it, and maybe if she just staked the face-boys, they’d let the voice-guys keep singing, and then…

But it was tough to find a vamp who was a gerbil scurrying around at your feet, squeaking, and…

“C’mon, pet, we have to go. Dawn called.”

“Not now, Spike. I still have to stake Milli. Then maybe…”

He grabbed her shoulder and shook it, breaking her concentration. It pissed her off… and even worse, broke her eye-contact with the rodent, who dashed between two gravestones and vanished. “Now, look what you made me do! And I even shrank down Mr. Pointy just to make this work…”

“Buffy, love, you need to wake up.”

Her eyes popped open, and she stared around her in confusion. “I wasn’t… sleeping. Oh.” After a second she got her bearings, realized she was in the dorm, face practically smooshed into Spike’s naked chest, that it was still dark… and that he was holding the phone?

Oh. Not a squeaking gerbil. A ringing noise. “Wh…” she began, blearily.

“That was Dawn, pet. She says Mum’s come over a bit dizzy and that we should maybe run back.”

That got her up in a flash. She was grabbing for her discarded blouse before Spike was even out of bed. “What time is it?”

“‘Bout six.”

They made it back to Revello in record time… only to find Mom stable and ready to pooh-pooh everything. “I got a little woozy. Nothing to worry about. Dr. Kriegel and Dr. Aarens both said this might happen; and I even have a follow-up scheduled for later today, remember?” She smiled reassuringly at them. “Perfect timing, right? They’ll do an MRI just like they planned, tell me they’re going to add another pill to my daily stash…”

“Mom, this is no laughing matter! You could have some kind of… complication! We need to take you in right now!” Buffy was already heading out to the living room to grab Mom’s purse.

“Oh, nonsense. I have to get Dawn to school, and…”

“I can get myself to school,” Dawn assured her, wide-eyed. “Right, Buffy?” she called into the hall. “I can so take the bus. You don’t have to drive me, Mom. You’re all dizzy, and…”   
  
“She’s right,” Buffy answered, returning cradling the purse. “Dawn can totally…”

“I’ll take Niblet to school,” Spike insisted. “Sun’s not all the way up yet, and I’ll dodge into the tunnels, after…” 

“For goodness sake, William. I’m fine…”

“No, you’re not,” Buffy insisted, plunking the purse down on the nearest stool.

“Spike, I can totally get there on my own…” Flinging an arm out in an emphatic gesture, Dawn knocked over the remainder of her glass of morning Nestle strawberry milk. Pink stuff splashed across the counter, ran through the grooves of grout in the tile, rolled down over the edges to drip onto the linoleum “Ooops…”

“Dammit!” Buffy hissed, and dodged toward the paper towels before Dawn could even stop blushing, much less move.

“Rot,” Spike informed the youngest Summers, without blinking. He didn’t even seem to notice that his precious duster had pink milk substance spattered all over one lapel. “You’re as worried as Buffy. You ready?” He was frowning and jittering, obviously dying to do something useful. Sitting still was so not his friend.

Still armed with cleaning supplies and with lip caught in her teeth, Buffy moved around her klutzy sister to dab studiously at the soiled leather. Spike, though, caught the sodden paper towel out of her hand before she could smear things worse. “Leave off, pet. I’ll get it. You’re turnin’ into Martha bloody Stewart, you’re so soddin’ anxious. Worry about Mum.” He dropped an unceremonious kiss to the top of her head and gave her a shove. “It’s survived Chiraago venom, yeah?”

He had a point. She dropped the paper towels in the trash and headed back to the stool for the purse, her heartbeat fluttering, breathing too fast, nerves jangling. She just needed to  _ do _ something.

Clearly so did Spike. “Let’s be off, Platelet. Have all your things?”

Dawn was still blushing a little, and looked more than slightly at a loss. “Well, I still need my notebook, and I haven’t made breakfast yet…”

Mom patted her. “I’m fine, punkin-belly. Go make food. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. You can do that while I debate with these two.” And she shot Buffy a  _ look _ . “And calm your sister down. She’s making us all anxious.” 

“Mom!” Dawn protested, “that's like my kid name!”

“We should make sure  _ you _ have breakfast,” Buffy interrupted her own whirling thoughts, abruptly torn between dragging her mother off to the hospital immediately and making sure she was fed. Spinning, she headed away from the purse to stare at the stove, undecided. 

She barely noticed her own stomach, rumbling unsatisfied.

“I can come back, pet, cook her summat so it’ll be waiting. You’ll need summat too, by then, I’ll warrant…”

Buffy halted mid-whirl to blink at her guy. “You…”

“Can make a decent omelet, at least.”

“Oh.” That was… unexpected.

“Well, that would be lovely, Spike.”

“Oooh, are you gonna put blood in it?” Dawn sounded entranced.

Spike rolled his eyes. “You don’t cook blood, Platelet. Ruins it.” He shrugged gamely. “‘Less you’re makin’ black pudding. Then that’s it’s own thing, innit?”

“Ew,” Buffy contributed promptly. “And on that note, ready Mom?” The thought of burnt blood had put an abrupt and significant damper on her burgeoning appetite.

“Though, bein’ honest, heard you can substitute blood for eggs and get the same protein and consistency. If you were bakin’ a cake, mind, or summat like that…”

“Please don’t ever try that on my account, William,” Mom put in, rising with reluctance. “I’m fine with eggs.” Her eyes darted to Dawn. “And no experimenting. Spike is the only one who gets to use blood in this kitchen, because I trust him to clean up.”

Dawn sighed heavily, sounding put-upon.

Buffy caught up the purse again and reached for her mother’s arm. As they headed for the door, something else crashed to the floor. /God, you’re a spaz, Dawn./

“Easy on the cutlery, Niblet. That nearly bounced up and staked me.”

“Oh, c’mon, it wasn’t even wooden…”

They left the graceless duo to it and headed out the back. While Mom was getting behind the wheel, Buffy found herself wondering something aloud. “Did, um… I ever have any nicknames? Dawn gets ‘lil punkin-belly’…” 

Mom frowned at her as she turned the key in the ignition. “No, I think you were always just Buffy.”

“Oh.” /I wasn’t even the baby before you  _ had _ the baby?/

Sometimes it sucked being the oldest and the responsible one and… everything. /I don’t even get a break from that with my  _ family _ ./

Thank goodness she had Spike, or she’d probably have gone nuts by now.

***

“So I surmise, then, Joyce, that what you had was actually something that wasn’t precisely seizure activity, but is related. Your mass touched on an area directly adjacent to the temporal lobe, as well as touching on the speech center of the frontal lobe, so I’m honestly just glad that you’re only experiencing dizziness, time-space-displacement, and mild confusion as you heal, rather than any speech difficulties, as those might indicate damage to Broca’s area…”

“Wait, hold on a minute.  _ Speech _ difficulties?”

“It’s highly unlikely that you’d have any at this stage, if they haven’t already presented.”

“Well,” Mom murmured, sinking back into her chair. “That’s a relief, I guess.”

Buffy really couldn’t with this doctor. You’d think they’d have told her about stuff like this a long time ago! 

Or, maybe they had, and it had just been so much that it had all just flown by in the mass of 411 that had been dumped on her. Buffy wouldn’t doubt it, considering everything that had gone on in those crazy couple of weeks. 

“Seizure activity?” Mom prompted softly.

“Seizure- _ like _ activity,” the neurologist qualified cautiously. “Those areas of the brain haven’t been damaged, really, so much as… lightly ruffled in passing. They’re a little irritated, if you will, and will likely continue to be until the healing process completes itself.” Dr. Kriegel turned his attention back to Mom, kindly and calm. “Joyce, what we want you to do now is to continue the steroid treatment we started you on, to keep down inflammation… and I’m going to add in an anticonvulsant just to be safe. I didn’t want to put you through that until and if we saw signs of this sort of activity, since it was a question, whether the temporal lobe and surrounding areas such as the frontal and auriculotemporal portions of the trigeminal nerve, might be engaged. But now that it seems they have, I think we’ll need to try you on one…”

Buffy could tell her mother was just as thrown as she was by all the doctor-speak. Some nerve was upset, and it meant she needed to take… seizure meds?

“…Barring side-effects, you should be fine. If you have them and they prove something you can’t live with, we’ll discontinue our first attempt and try another. But I assure you; one way or the other, we’ll get you on the right track. And hopefully this will be a temporary situation for you; just till your brain heals.” He gave a little nod. “I’m just grateful your cytoma turned out to be benign. No need to turn you back over to Dr. Aarens for chemotherapy or postirradiation. We’ll keep you on a regular schedule of MRIs, same as we’ve already been doing, and monitor you till you’re back on your feet and showing no further signs of complications…”

Mom was nodding along like a mechanical toy. “I thought the headaches would stop, too,” she began, tentatively.

A sad little smile. “Well, you did have brain surgery. These headaches are different, I would think, at least?”

“Oh, yes. A lot different. They feel… like a hollow hurt instead of a… pressure-y hurt.” Mom frowned. “But still basically a migraine once they really get going.”

The doctor nodded. “Luckily the medication I want to give you is the lowest-impact anticonvulsant we have, with the least incidence of side-effects; and it is also commonly prescribed for the sort of migraines with aura which mimics seizure activity. Topamax should have the desired effect all round for you; and while we’re at it we’ll get you a rescue med for when the migraines get away from you, till we get ‘em under control. But I suspect that as the inflammation continues to subside and your brain regroups to rebuild fluid and matter around the area where the cytoma was removed, you will have fewer incidences of migraine activity until they subside completely. You’re already showing excellent healing.”

Mom nodded, looking both more and less concerned. “So… I’ll just… pick this… Topamax up at the hospital pharmacy?”

“I’ll call it and the rescue med down right away. They should be ready for you before you leave today. The rescue—Imitrex—is pretty new, but folks have had good results. Topamax, though, should be readily available. It’s a fairly common medication, though they’ll probably give you the generic. Same thing, only about half the price.”   
  
“I appreciate that.”

“No problem.” Pushing to his feet, Dr. Kriegel held out his hand. Mom rose automatically, looking a little shaky but capable. “Please feel free to let us know immediately, Joyce, if anything comes up.”

“Okay. I will.”

“We definitely will,” Buffy put in, shaking in her turn, and shot her mother a fierce glance. 

Mom pretended to ward off her glare with both hands. “Alright, Buffy, you were right…”

“I’m always right.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’d go  _ that _ far…”

“And now we’re gonna get your pills and take you home to feed you a nice, complete breakfast, and then put you to bed…”

“Oh, for goodness sake! I’m perfectly capable of going to work…”

“Anya can handle it. Until this new med kicks in, you’re ‘Oprah’-watchin’ girl, young lady!”

Mom rolled her eyes. “Or what, you’ll sic your boyfriend on me?”

Buffy almost laughed in her face. “Oh, don’t tempt me. He’ll mother hen you into the next century.” Once Spike heard that ‘mum’ was having brain activity that, what was it? ‘Mimicked seizures’, and that she needed anticonvulsants, he was probably going to sleep at Revello and sit on Mom or something, to keep her from falling down. He might even insist on escorting her to the bathroom for a couple of days.

She kind of got the feeling that between Drusilla, during her post-Prague fiasco, and Mom-Pratt, her guy had spent his share of time attending a bedside, and… /You know what? Maybe it’s time to get the full story out of him on  _ that _ whole thing./ She had waited and been patient and respectful, but the mom-issue was clearly super eating at her guy. /Time to push, I think./

Because it never rained but it poured in good old Sunnydale.

Mom’s mouth had flattened to a thin line. “I’m not a fan of threats,” she informed her daughter.

/Tough./ “Then behave yourself.”

“Well,” Dr. Kriegel broke in, a chuckle hidden in his tones, “I can see you’re in good hands, Joyce. I’ll leave you with Buffy. Have a nice, quiet afternoon…”

“I guess I don’t have much choice, do I?” Mom answered ruefully, and crossed her arms over her chest. But she sounded resigned, even a little amused. It seemed the conversation with the doctor had knocked a little of the wind out of her convalescent sails.

***

Buffy was just turning away from the pharmacy window to head back toward the waiting room area and Mom when it happened. A patient was being wheeled down the corridor behind her, the faint sound of raving going on in her periphery as they passed. She was barely paying attention at first as she read over the labels. All her concentration was going to rehearsing the instructions written there. Maybe if she slotted them firmly into a groove in her brain, she wouldn’t forget them before she had to repeat them to Mom. /…‘Continue at twenty-five milligrams once daily until’…/ 

“…I have to go! I don’t  _ belong _ here!” 

“Hey, Buffy.”

Buffy blinked back to the surface, recognized Ben, the intern guy. Resident? /Creep./ “Oh. Hi.” /I so don’t have time for you today./

Barely paying attention to his too-attentive smile, she turned back to the bottles, murmuring to herself. “…And then increase to fifty milligrams after one week if symptoms…”

Out of nowhere, the rescue-med bottle was slapped out of her left hand as the guy on the gurney shot upright and fought to escape Ben and the nurse who was helping him. “I have important  _ instructions! _ Fascists!”

Ben turned all grim as he swung away and shoved the guy flat again. The nurse and an orderly dove in to attempt to strap the dude down with Velcro restraints. Buffy winced internally and clutched at her remaining bottle a little too hard as she started to bend for the dropped one. She knew what it was like to be at the other end of those damn things… but it definitely looked like this guy needed…

Wait. There was something familiar about crazy dude. 

Forgetting the pills for a moment, she stepped a little closer to inspect his tooth-bared, raving countenance. The struggling man currently swinging at the orderlies was tanned, long-faced, careworn, and looked intense and even a little terrified. He hadn’t looked so incredibly animated last night, for sure, and he for sure hadn’t looked like the type to lose it and smack a bunch of nurses across the face in an attempt to stay out of restraints… or to be in the position to need them in the first place. But… yeah. This sure looked like the same guy, features-wise. And he had the same voice. 

“Now you're hurting the nice orderly who's here to help you.” Ben’s tones were tolerant, but with an edge as he turned away from the struggling man to bark a quick order at the nurse. “I need nine cc's of Phenobarbital in this guy n…”

The night-watchman guy was already halfway back up. Buffy stepped in out of instinct to slam him back down and hold him still, palm to his chest. He stared up at her, gasping, every tooth showing in a rictus and half-snarling as he rambled his nonsense. 

Ben was staring at her too, his expression amazed rather than feral. “Or not,” he told the nurse, and blinked some more at Buffy. “Strap him!” He shot a quick glance down at his patient. “For your own good, I promise.” And his eyes were back on Buffy. “You know, not to be rampantly sexist in the workplace, but you've got some serious muscles for a girl.”

/Shit./ Should she pretend to have problems all the sudden? 

Probably not. They already had the guy half velcro’d down. It would mess everything up. Besides; they had all seen her hold the guy down all effortlessly for a half a minute by now. “Uh…” Dammit, she hadn’t made a mistake like this in public in  _ years _ . 

She just flat-out hadn’t been thinking. Seeing Security Guy in here ranting like that had completely thrown her. 

/Time for a subject change. Check./ “I…”

“Radioactive spider-bite,” Ben put in quietly.

/Oh, jeez./ He was giving her an out… and he was trying to be charming again. Did the guy ever give up? He was giving it another shot here and now, in the middle of one of his patients going off the deep end. Seriously? “Yeah. How’d you guess?” At least it would be a relief not to have to come up with something.

Maybe she should hook this guy up with Xander.

“I’m a doctor,” Ben answered, all modesty. “Well, almost.”

/Oh, wow./ And there was the pitch. This guy didn’t miss a beat, did he?

Buffy was startled out of her musings when Security Guy made a grab for her pill-holding hand with his only un-strapped one, snatched up the bottle, stared at it, and choked out a laugh. “Doesn’t even help. Doesn’t make a damn bit of difference!”

/Wh… Okay…/ Buffy tore her eyes away to focus on Ben. This meeting needed to stay all business. “I’ve met this guy. He’s a security guard. He’s not crazy.”

Ben scoffed just a little and flicked his eyes at the evidence. “If you  _ say _ so…”

Security Guy, of course, chose that moment to make her sound like a total liar. “They’re coming at you,” he hissed, rising up as far as he could to strain toward her. The cords of his neck were showing, and she could see his vein throbbing there. “Don’t think you're above it, missy! They come through the family! They get to your  _ family!” _

Buffy felt a cold chill run through her. Her eyes jerked toward her mother, waiting just around the corner in those hard, plastic seats. Her mother, who had just randomly gotten that unexplained tumor, and was now all randomly wobbly and shaky and seizure-y when she was supposed to be getting better, and… “My family? What do you mean?”

The orderly had come around to strap down the struggling arm. The pill bottle dropped away to hit the floor next to its friend. Ben shook his head. “Let’s get him to exam one,” he snapped to his people, sounding tired.  _ “Now _ would be nice.”

Buffy felt numb, stared after the gurney as the man was wheeled away. She almost didn’t register it at first when Ben bent, rose, straightened, and handed the two truant pill-bottles to her. “I’m real sorry about that. Here.” 

“Yeah…”

“Those… for your mom?”

He’d clearly glanced at the labels, which was… kind of nosy. Wasn’t that illegal or something, to know someone’s medical stuff when you weren’t on their case, or not on it anymore? 

Buffy struggled between her innate training to be polite and her insane urge to tell him to back off because it was none of his damn business. Anyway she had too much to deal with right now to answer his out of place questions. Finally, she answered, mostly because it was the path of least resistance. “Yeah. I need to get her home. Sorry, I have to go…”

“How’s she doing?”

/Oh my  _ God _ , dude! Invasive, much?/ It sounded like genuine concern, but she just really didn’t feel like being bothered, and why was it his business when she had already said she had to go, and… “I don’t want to talk about it right now. See you later.” Turning, she beat feet as quickly as she could, back to the waiting area. 

For some reason she couldn’t quite pinpoint, hover-y Intern Ben was really starting to get on her nerves.

/And I so have way more things to think about than whether you’re just being nice, or whether you’re trying to get in my pants./

***

Back at home, she got Mom firmly ensconced at the table, with serious orders to sit tight, take the first of her new pills, which didn’t need food to go down, and wait patiently. She promptly headed into the kitchen to help Chef Spike make… whatever… and took a moment to fold herself into his arms before the great cookoff started. 

“What happened, pet? I could feel you all the way back here.”

His hand, stroking down her hair, was everything. It made the spinning world still briefly. “I think something out there is making Mom sick,” she whispered to his throat, and turned her face to bury her nose in that perfect hollow at his collarbone. “I can’t. I can’t deal with this. If something that we’re fighting is coming at  _ Mom _ …”

“Then we fucking  _ kill _ it,” he answered, low and immediate, and his voice was death incarnate. He didn’t remotely cease his stroking, but everything in him was hard and vibrating with readiness. “We go out tonight, we find it, we destroy it. Nothing hurts our family, Buffy. No one ever touches our Niblet, and not one bloody thing in this universe touches Mum.”

“Yeah. Okay.” She could breathe. They would take care of it. /We’ll take care of this together./

“Alright?”

She could nod, let him go, put it away for long enough to take care of her mother, before they went back to business. “Okay.” She pulled back, gave a little nod. “All better again.”

He slipped two fingers under her chin, lifted it, bent a little. Kissed her, just lightly; a peck on the lips that was a promise, then put her away from him. “What does Mum like on her omelets, then?”

The answer was automatic. “Anything but olives.”

“Right.” Swinging away, he started pulling things out of the fridge. And it was only then that she realized he was wearing an apron—Mom’s apron—like he was Emeril or something.

She managed to stifle the slightly-hysterical giggle, just barely, but some of it slid out around the edges with a sort of high-pitched whistling noise. Which he, of course, heard, and turned back to shoot her a narrow-eyed glance from his periphery. “You think I’m going to get egg yolk on the duster, pet, you’ve got another think coming. Pink milk was bloody bad enough.”

“Oh. Right. Of course.” Spinning away, she bent over, palms to knees, and completely lost it.

“Whatever’s happening in there, I could use a good joke too,” Mom called from the dining room.

Buffy waved a hand weakly toward the doorway. “I can’t…” she gasped, helpless. “You’d have to  _ see _ it…”

Spike growled at her, the sound of him cracking eggs into a bowl regular as a metronome. 

There was a scrape of a chair, and then Mom was in the doorway. “Are you doing that one-handed, Spike?” she asked, sounding fascinated.

“Course. Cook taught me how when I was a lad.”

“Well, that’s a neat trick. Can you show me?”

“Sure. Another time. Right now we’re supposed to be seeing to it you get pampered, so get the bloody hell off your feet and let us make you a nice breakfast, Joyce…”

Mom shook her head. “What ‘we’? I don’t see a ‘we’. I see my daughter looking like she’s going to collapse on the floor from suffocation…”

“Thinks it’s too bloody funny to see me in this getup, innit?”

Mom eyed her breathless daughter disapprovingly. “Well, that’s hardly fair, Buffy. If he’s going to be cooking…”

Buffy had to sit. She was going to hyperventilate. How was Mom taking this so easily in  _ stride? _

“Well, I suppose eventually she’ll get herself together enough to help you. She’s really very good at seasoning things to taste. No offense, Spike, but I’d rather you have her do that part. You tend to make everything a little too warm for my liking.”

“Understood, Mum.”

“Alright, I’ll head back to my station.” With another ‘tsk tsk’ sort of look for her daughter, Mom headed back toward the table.

Buffy did some deep-breathing exercises, and eventually managed to get herself under control. She even mostly kept a straight face as she turned to the sink to wash her hands. “So… ah…” Wheeze. “I can chop some…” She bit back another burst as a flash of memory assailed her, and she’d probably be briefly losing it for the next week as her brain sent her renewed snapshots of that moment on repeat. “…Bell peppers, or mushrooms, or…”

“Sure you’re not gonna cut off a bloody finger, chortling away there like a baboon, love?”

Buffy sighed at his prickly tone. Now she’d gone and hurt his feelings. “Sorry,” she answered, turning back to dry her hands. “I just… never pictured you cooking, much less…”

“Why the bloody hell not?” he demanded. 

“I dunno. Guy from the olden days?” she defended as she dug out a knife. “Wasn’t it supposed to be, like, against the law for guys to do that kind of thing back then, because it was women’s work?” She moved around behind his tense back and butt to open the fridge, dig in the crisper. “And besides, you had, like, servants.”

Spike actually growled a little at her summary. “Bollocks. Soldiers had to cook their own food or they starved. Lower-class blokes cooked for themselves. Innkeepers cooked. Men in service cooked. Most blokes knew how, at least, to get a potato into edible form or summat if they were a peasant, or if they were a gentleman, a pheasant or a perch or haunch of venison if they were out hunting. We weren’t bloody babies who couldn’t care for ourselves without a woman about.”

“Oh.” Apparently she’d pissed him off. /But… that was just what we’re taught  _ happened _ ./

“Any road, you know I like food. Traveled all over the soddin’ world. Plenty of things I found I liked but couldn’t have again once we’d left a place, so I found out how to make it so I could have it again; or there were things I missed from home. Curry an’ the like.” His voice took on a faraway, nostalgic tone. “Cook made a curry that was like nothin’ I’ve had before or since. She was Punjabi; or leastaways, her family was—and she…” He trailed off. “Never mind.”

Buffy came back around, dumped her load on the counter, lightly touched his arm. “I just never thought about it. Guy from back in the day, then vampire, you know? Why would you ever need to learn?”

He took that in for a sec, then nodded and sighed. “Don’t mind me, Buffy. I’m anxious. And I know they teach you that sort of rot in schools. Here. What sort of seasonings does Mum like, then? You take over this bit and I’ll cut up some things.”

They switched back and forth interchangeably, wielding knife or spatula depending on necessity until they got the job adequately done. In short order they had a decent tray going with their co-authored omelet, a nice orange-juice-and-coffee-selection happening, the coffee creamed-and-sugared to Mom’s exact specifications, and Buffy had darted off with a last minute, whispered order to Spike to hold up the train, found a small vase and a little, dried-out rose from the ones Spike had brought in for her last week because he was the bestest evar. 

It was an awesome tray for sure by the time they were done with it. “Okay, here you go,” she called as she carried it in, Spike trailing behind her and peeling the apron off over his head.

“Wow, check out the ‘pamper Mom’ platter…” She narrowed her eyes at them. “I know you said you can’t get her pregnant, Spike…”

He snorted dismissively and pointed with his chin at the tray. “Let us know if it’s to taste, Mum.”

She cut off a corner, popped it in her mouth… and her eyes rolled up a little. “Mmmm. Well.” She swallowed to clear her mouth, smiled at them both. She definitely looked less pale than earlier in the day, at least. Good to see her rallying. “I’m definitely not that sick.” She shot Buffy a suspicious look. “How are your grades? Because I know you missed class this morning to take me in…”

“Oh, jeez. I can handle it. I’ll talk to Dr. Crowder. He knows what’s going on with you…”

Mom’s eyes slid to the co-cook. “Not under indictment for anything, Spike?”

Spike lifted his left hand and wiggled all his fingers. “I’m too good to get caught.”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “I’ll say. You have no idea how many of my un…” She cut herself off very abruptly and decided that nearly a year’s worth of not-blushing really did pay off. Better to just slide into a seat and busy herself with her own, much less decorated plateful of omelet, pretend she hadn’t spoken. And… mmm. It really was very good, omelet-wise. Buffy shot her guy an impressed look. 

He smirked back, whether for the appreciation, or for the unspoken kudos to his lingerie-thieving skills, she wasn’t sure.

Mom let the slip roll right on by without biting. “This really is the life. Maybe I should get dizzy more often.” 

_ “No!” _ It slipped out around a mouthful of eggs before Buffy could censor herself. And just like that, she was tense as a live wire again.

Seated beside her, Spike’s hand fell to cover hers on the table, soothing. Or, it was meant to be, except that he was as tense as she was, so really all that did was make her more vibrate-y and ready to get on this thing, whatever it was. Hunt down and destroy. 

Mom watched them for a moment, her mug of coffee lifted halfway to her mouth. “Something’s up, isn’t it?”

Buffy opened her mouth to start the lying game, but of course Spike beat her to it. “We don’t know yet, Joyce. But we likely have to go soon to see if we can suss that out, if you’re alright.”

“Oh, yes, sure. If I need to I can have Anya close up and come check in on me…”

Spike’s fingers clenched spasmodically on Buffy’s hand. Not that she was going to let it go like that. “No,” she interrupted firmly. “One of us will come back to check on you. Probably me, since it’s the middle of the day, and Spike’s probably gonna be stuck in the tunnels soon unless he keeps…”

“I’ve no problem doing a dash or two to stay with you, Joyce,” Spike insisted.

Mom pulled her mouth away from her coffee and beamed at him. “My goodness, where were you twenty years ago, anyway? Hank would never have made it into the top ten.” Setting down the mug, she turned to Buffy, gaze serious. “If you ever decide to dump him, I’m next in line. We’ll grow old together with our feet up, watching  _ Passions _ …”

Buffy rolled her eyes and, finishing the final bite of her segment of omelet, pushed herself to her feet with plate in hand. “He doesn’t grow old. And you two do that all the time anyway.”

“You’re very flattering, Joyce.”

“Oh, get out of here, both of you. I’m fine.”

Shaking her head at her mother, Buffy picked up her fork and grabbed Spike’s sleeve. “I want you to relax all day,” she ordered her mother, “keep your feet up. Plenty of  _ Oprah _ .” 

“The Rx from doc Buffy.”

“You know it.”

Once outside they made their usual mad dash to the DeSoto, and Spike sighed, slumping down behind the wheel. “Alright, tell me. What the bloody hell is on for this week, then?”

She told him, leaving nothing out.

“Christ,” he whispered after she’d finished. “‘They come at you through your family’? What the bloody hell kind of warning is that?”

/The kind of warning I got from Angelus./ “The kind,” Buffy informed him, “that gets bad guys dead.”

He straightened and turned the key in the ignition. “That it does.”

***

Xander’s friends were hammering away at stuff and generally making a crazy racket when Buffy and Spike dashed under the awning from the back alley and into the rear door of the new shop. Tossing the smoldering blanket to the floor, Spike stomped automatically at it, then sighed and picked it up to lob it lazily over what looked vaguely like a shapeless mannequin-type-figure, all head and neckless torso with no legs. “Now I know why that tosser Dracula went about with a fucking cloak all the buggerin’ time. Dramatic nonsense an’ all, but also useful for keepin’ out of the sun, I’ll wager.”

Buffy turned to face him, walking backward, and flashed him a delighted grin complete with lifted brows. “Oh, please tell me you’re gonna start walking around like a drama queen with a cloak and a hood and stuff.”

The comment earned her a predictable scowl. “I will bloody well cut you off for a month if you even suggest it.”

He was so easy. “So, you’d rather burn than use a totally practical garment…”

“Oh, keep it up, Slayer.” He was all thunderous eyebrows by this point. “I mean it. No sex for a damned month if you even suggest I play moody vampire pinup just to stay out of the light, like a great ponce…”

Oh, he wanted to bet, did he? “As if you could hold out against me for even a day…”

His eyebrows went up in turn, challenged. “Oh, you just watch me, pet.”

/Okay, hold up./ She stopped dead, stung. “Oh, so I can’t hold out against you, but you could totally hold out against me, is that it?”

Realizing a little too late that he’d completely stuck his foot in it, Spike swiftly lifted his hands, expression turning rapidly from bad and moody to conciliatory. “You could seduce me in seconds and you know it, love. No need to get shirty…”

“Oh, no. You’re not gonna get out of this that easy.” She stalked closer, a lioness prepared to pounce on her prey. /How  _ dare _ you, you asshole?/ 

He watched her approach, eyes glittering warily, though to his credit he didn’t back away. “Fuck. Buffy, I didn’t mean…”

She had her go-to stake out of her back waistband and pressed to the precise center of his chest before he could finish. Nowhere near his heart, of course. It never was, when they played like this; but still, his breathing quickened, and she could swear she  _ heard _ his cock scrape against his zipper as it hardened mercilessly in his jeans. She definitely felt the sudden, agonized reaction in her own groin; an echo of his explosive, shocked arousal. “Don’t fuck with me, Spike. I’ll win.” Her eyes flickered pointedly south, and she dropped her free hand to cup him, hard. Dug her nails in a little. “That’s  _ mine _ .”

He exhaled sharply and gave a swift, jerky nod. She watched his adam’s apple bob as he swallowed, felt his painful arousal course through them both. “It bloody well is,” he whispered hoarsely. “All of me is. You  _ know _ it is.”

She shoved Mr. Pointy a little harder against his chest, drawing the faintest hint of blood, and gave his writhing cock a hard rub through his rough jeans. “Alright then.” And she dropped her hand away.

Breathing like he’d just run a race, he seemed to contemplate his next move. Then, abruptly decided, he drew his lip between his teeth and cocked his head at her. “Should we lock the inside door, then?” he asked softly. “So I can show you?”

Exhaling through her nostrils, she yanked the stake away and shoved it back in her waistband. His capitulation was all she’d wanted, for now. Knowing he would be walking around behind her, excruciatingly aroused, was a nice side-benefit. “Nope.” And turning sharply away, she ignored her own new and aching need to march toward the door leading to the interior of the store. 

She didn’t, though, miss the flare of his nostrils. “You’re not fooling anyone, Buffy,” he called as he drew up close behind her.

“Not trying to,” she answered easily as she turned the knob.

Crowding just a little too close, he grumbled. The cool air of his breath sifted through the tiny hairs on the back of her neck, under her ponytail… And then his hand closed over her right wrist at the door… and then her left, pushing it against the doorframe, and he was crowding even closer, the long, hard length of him all over her against her back and ass, so she could feel what she did to him. “Damn you,” he whispered, and trailed his cheek over her crown, breathing her in.

Open-mouthed, she inhaled the scent of his wanting her. “Well,” she murmured back, briefly undone, “as business partners, we’re crappy at staying on point.”

“Established that about a year ago.”

“I know.” Her eyes fell closed involuntarily.

He ground a little against the upper swell of her rear, juddering her toward the panel of the door. “Got a lot of stress on right now, as well.”

/I. Am. A. Responsible. Adult./ “We… should probably go… do something about the stress thing. You know, so we can focus on…”

He nipped her neck, making her careen back against his chest. “Yeah. Solve the bloody mystery of the great, glowing testicle, beat the everloving shite out of whatever’s comin’ after Mum…” He slowed his roll abruptly to bury his face in against her throat. “And then I’ll ask you to bind me up somewhere, pet, if you will, and play mistress. I’m thinkin’ I’d rather like to have you roger me, love, if you’re willing. I think I’m ready.”

/Roger…  _ Oh _ . Oh, wow./ Screeching to a halt, Buffy’s brain very swiftly switched tracks to something meltingly tender and tentative and yet, somehow hesitantly triumphant, all at the same time. Opening her eyes, she turned her head a little to try to view him over her shoulder. God, the look on his face; so open, so… yearning. “That, um… sounds…”

“Since you seem so intent on playing mistress at mo’.” Holy  _ damn _ , he looked…

He looked  _ hungry _ .

She shivered, abruptly certain that she really couldn’t go out there and face anyone remotely like a father figure. Or, anyone at all, really. “I…” /God./ She spent a little time just breathing, while visions of him spread-eagled on the bed, gleaming, bound down and shivering under her slow, gentle touch and grinding helplessly onto the sheets, made her bite her lip. “Why are you doing this to me right  _ now?” _ she demanded, suddenly breathless and beyond distracted.

“Dunno,” he answered, breathy and rough. “Same reason you did it to me, I reckon. Figure we both need something else to think about so we don’t go mad, yeah?”

/Well… jeez. Mission freaking accomplished!/ “Guh.”

“Meantime…” Loosing his hold on her right wrist, he slid his fingers up over her upper arm, trailed them behind her tricep, kissed her shoulder. He had a deeply absorbed expression going on right now. “Figure we ought to get on, so we can be done with this newest threat and get back to the bit where you strap me down and love me insensible, innit?”

The jolt he was sending through her, thinking of it, was the very definition of the gift that kept on giving, and… /You’re such an asshole./ As his other hand dropped away to release her, coasted to her waist, she threw him an incredulous glance over her shoulder. “Now that I can’t brain enough to even talk, you want me to go in there?” Shoving back hard to shake him off, she wrenched her body free of his light, palming grasp and did her best to straighten her clothes and breathe relatively Spike-free air for a second. At least when he wasn’t physically touching her she could reset without feeling as much of his deep, aching yearning for her to… To  _ have _ him like that, which was…

/Holy jeez./

Feeling suddenly very thirsty, Buffy cleared her throat, jerked her chin in the direction of the bathrooms, which were to the right just past the door. “You. Go make yourself useful. Stay off of me and go get me some water or something while I go in there and remember how to speak in full sentences.” And, firmly commanding her libido to perk back down to ‘useful engine for fighting evil’, she reached for the doorknob once more.

Grinning, Spike stepped back and gave a tiny hint of a bow. “Whatever you say, Slayer,” he answered casually.

He was so awful. And she really was going to fuck his brains out just as soon as they dealt with this whatever-it-was. And he was going to  _ love _ it.

Leaving her guy behind to go fetch her something to drink, Buffy strode purposefully through the tiny hallway toward the area where Giles was going to put the counter. Two of Xander’s three under-the-table buddies were swarming around the glass structure, one lying down on the ground doing something with what looked like a mallet and the other carrying a bucket of something that smelled industrial and glue-y. The third guy was over by the near wall, hammering on something. “How’s it coming?” she asked as she altered her approach to zero in on her Watcher. Giles was standing as far from that barfy smell as he could manage, sweeping the area that was finished, over there by the bay-window where the fortune-teller would someday be stationed. 

“Oh, it goes apace,” Giles answered absently. He sounded stressed.

Buffy nodded, feeling a lot less, ah… fretful all the sudden. One thing to be said for icky construction smells; they dampened the libido when nothing else did the trick.

Spike seemed to agree, his face twisting as he approached her shoulder to pass her a paper cup full of tap water. “Any news about that bauble of ours, Watcher?” he asked in a tense, gagging sort of voice.

“Oh?” The careworn face pulled up from a study of paint buckets and drop-cloths. “Hm, yes… And, no. I’ve put Willow and Tara, and Jonathan on it…”

Buffy’s anxiety came leaping back, along with a serious dollop if frustration-cum-anger. It made it tough to swallow her lukewarm drink. “I know you’re hung up on the whole remodel thing, Giles, but I’d think you’d be on it too, since, you know, big bad, Slayer dream-warning, hellmouth, danger-danger? Kind of a bigger deal than fixing up the shop that’ll keep for a day or so?”

Giles blinked her into focus. “Buffy, I assure you that I’m taking the puzzle very seriously. I spent the morning looking at the books with the children, but I simply had to come over here and see to it that the crew was on schedule as well, or my investment, and your mother’s for that matter, would have…”

It burst out of her, atop Spike’s low, menacing growl. “It’s  _ Mom _ that I’m worried about!”

Sudden lack of hammering and general silence from over by the makeshift counter.

Giles’ confusion was as clear as his concern. “I beg your pardon? I thought she was recovering quite well; and in any case, how does her recent health issue have anything to do with…”

Crunching and dropping the dixie cup, Buffy grabbed his tweed lapel and, with a glance over at the now-curiously-staring construction guys, dragged him further over toward the little bay window. Spike followed them closely, everything about him radiating tightly-reined-in fury and desperation to match her own.  _ “Look,” _ Buffy whispered urgently to her Watcher, “the night watchman guy who gave us that  _ thing _ last night? Well, he showed up at the hospital this morning during Mom’s follow-up. He went crazy—like, overnight—after handling that stupid thing…”

Giles recoiled in sudden alarm.

“Oh, don’t be such a bleedin’ pansy, Rupert,” Spike growled. “Wasn’t from touchin’ it, or Slayer an’ I would both have likely gone round the twist as well by now.” He gestured with his chin, fiddling with something in his duster pocket. “Sod told Buffy some horror-story about how ‘they’ll come at her through her bloody family’. And Joyce came over all woozy this morning, had to be given new medications. Bleedin’ anticonvulsants…”

Giles straightened, openly alarmed at Spike’s summary. “Is that… common after a surgery like hers?”

Buffy bit her lip uncertainly, fighting to breathe. Spike laid a palm at the center of her back. It steadied her, and she nodded once, drew in a deep breath to focus everything back down to that one, fixed, determined point, straightened. “Yeah. The doctor said so. But… it just seems a little too perfect, you know? She had the surgery and she’s fine, and then this?”

Giles nodded grimly, eyes pointed at his toes. “Very well. But it does rather beg the question;  _ who _ will come at you… through your family?”

Spike answered before Buffy could. “Haven’t sussed that out yet, have we? But whoever the bloody hell it is, they’re already soddin’ dead, aren’t they?” he spat, and tugged out his latest cheap Bic to flick at the striker with grim, if amorphous determination.

“All we know is,” Buffy picked up, “this guy isn’t crazy. I think he can… see reality in a way we can’t right now or something. Like he can see through what the rest of us are seeing. I dunno. He knew someone’s hurting Mom…” Spike’s spazzing went into superspeed. Reaching out, she absently laid a calming hand over his anxiously flicking thumb. He sounded like a raspy metronome. “I think it’s pretty clear that whoever it is, they’re using her to get to me. Or us. Whatever.”

Stilling under her touch, Spike bit his lip and shoved the lighter back into his pocket, then went vamp-statue-still, like one of those gorgeous Michelangelo carvings. Living marble, only all modern and dressed in leather. 

Giles sighed heavily and scrubbed one hand over his face. The glasses came off. “I’ll concede it’s possible. But still... the ramblings of a madman aren't much to go on, you know.” 

Buffy wasn’t sure when she had felt so dire about anything. “Maybe. But it’s a start.” She shot a glance out of the corner of her eyes, at her frozen vampire. “We need to find out who's making my mom sick and how. We just got her back. She’s supposed to be all better now, and I’ll be damned if she starts… deteriorating or something because some…  _ thing _ wants to get at us!”

Spike unfroze slowly… and that one familiar feeling rippled through him. Resonated through Buffy as well, via the link that lay between them; the one that informed her that he was this close to fanging out. 

“You find it… and what?” Giles asked softly. “Bring it in for questioning?”

Spike’s low snarl was bloodcurdling, and utterly in concert with Buffy’s feels on the subject. “Then we  _ kill _ it,” he answered, and there was a serious finality in his words that was highly satisfactory.

***

They headed back to Giles’ apartment posthaste. It seemed like it was time to consult with Witches R Us. 

Buffy didn’t waste time. She dropped the bomb the minute she entered the room. “Someone put a spell on my mom, you guys. Something to screw up her healing or something. She’s having weird seizure activity and crap. We think it’s the new big bad, because the guy who found that glowy thing and handed it to us is down with the sickness in the hospital today, ranting a bunch of crazy-talk… and he just told me ‘they come at you through your family’.” End of summary.

The three witches gaped at her from their circle on the floor.

“Um… wow,” Jonathan ventured finally, blanching.

“Yeah, that’s a new kind of nasty.” Xander looked a little sick.

“I’m so sorry, Buffy,” Willow whispered.

Tara just looked horrified. 

“Yeah. And I’m not going to stand for it. So I need you guys to figure out what it is for me, and I need you to figure it out now. Spike and I need to go after this whatever-it-is like yesterday. We don’t have time to waste.”

They blinked. Then, with a bunch of concerted nods, they turned back to their cross-legged study of the glowy orb on the floor. 

“What’ve you got so far?”

“Um, well…” Willow stammered a little. “We know it’s not from this continent, originally, and that, um…”

“It’s a container,” Tara broke in, surprising Buffy with the almost commanding confidence in her voice. “It draws power from this plane—from the elements, from this Earth, if you will. From the pulsing center of the world. Its job is to…” She frowned, reached out to run a caressing hand over the sphere, just above it, like she was feeling said pulses, and closed her eyes. “…To push away at something, shove it away from this plane, cast it out. To channel a huge amount of local energy and primordial forces to drive something far from it. Destructive forces, maybe, if necessary.” Her eyes opened slowly, and  _ wow _ , they glowed. Heck; all of her seemed to glow. “Nature turns on a dime. It’s the most powerful thing that is. It creates… and it can destroy in an instant. To harness that power… You’d be the strongest being on this planet.”

Willow, it must be said, was staring at her girlfriend with a seriously riveted look about her. She was kind of panting right now, and okay, right then, Buffy got it. Got how their magicks stuff worked for them like sparring worked for Spike and herself. 

Off to one side, Jonathan was seriously blushing. “Th… that makes sense. I didn’t get any of that from it, but… I believe you.”

A faint smile touched the corners of Willow’s lips. “I felt the power emanations. The rest…” She was glowing back at Tara now, and alrighty-then. /Just get a room, you guys./

Shaking her head, Buffy sent a curious glance Giles’ way. If only one of the three of them sensed this powerful, pushy force thing…

“Tara is an exceedingly instinctive Earth-Witch. What she says, what she senses… You can most likely count on it as relevant and accurate.” The pronouncement was made with full-on Giles-weight.

/Well, okay then./

Tara was now the one blushing, the glowing dimmed back to the standard ‘shy-girl’ setting, and dang. It was nuts how much of a confident, powerful woman was hiding behind that curtain of hair and stutters. “Th…thank you, Mr. Giles.”

So, okay, that girl needed to be yanked right the hell out of her shell, stat. Especially if it meant she would then be able to pull out more big-guns stuff for them, speak up more often, contribute more. /We have a fight coming. We can’t have one of our big-time witches hiding under a confidence problem because she thinks we’re scary or something./

Didn’t Willow say she had a birthday coming up? /Not everyone’s birthdays have to be a shitshow, right?/ Hellmouth or no, they could probably come up with a decent enough party to convince Tara that she was totally one of them, loved and welcome and generally celebrated. Even with a new big bad looming, they should be able to manage that much, right? /Since, you know, it’s not one of  _ my _ birthdays and everything./

Though, to be fair, her last birthday had come off pretty comparatively awesome. Spike had seen to that. He had taken one look at the Bitchy-Buffy stress-show, dragged her off to screw her brains out till he’d gotten the full story of why she was flipping out, then snuck off to plan and plot and make her birthday a complete non-issue. 

His novel solution? Keep her in bed basically the entire day. Go small or go home. Tough to screw up a party when the party was in your pants. Less working parts to invite breakdown in the system. He had told all her friends to “bugger off” and mail their gifts or save them for the day after, “because Buffy needs to believe she’s broken the soddin’ curse”… then more or less kicked Willow out of the dorm and proceeded to ensure that Buffy had spent an entire twenty-four hours occupied, screaming, exhausted, fed, or unconscious and in recovery mode. She had eventually come out of her stupor to realize said birthday was over and she was very sore, completely without a care in the world, and that nothing whatsoever bad had happened or could possibly ever happen again. 

Essentially, it had been the polar opposite of her first truly awful birthday, and kind of a reclaiming. Not to mention, her guy had been there when she had woken up, not to state the obvious. Then, the next day, post-curse, she had received all of her belated presents and hugs from her peeps, vaguely amazed that he’d gotten away with sliding that one past her mother… And she no longer feared birthdays with quite the same vigor. In fact, she was actually kind of looking forward to her birthday this year. For one thing, she could only imagine how her vampire might top himself, when  _ that _ was his basis. 

Heck, if he just stuck with last year as a pattern, she was good with it. It was an excellent tradition, after all. She could be happy continuing with said tradition till the day she stopped counting birthdays.

Anyhoo. She was supposed to be thinking about Tara’s upcoming shindig. Totally different kind of celebration. They would make it good, if in a completely different way. Without letting Spike plan it, for sure. He’d just get the poor girl drunk or something. 

First on the docket, though, was figuring out this sphere thing, which was apparently some kind of weapon? “Do you think this was, like, made to fight something, Tara?” Buffy asked, trying to draw the girl out some more.

Tara shook her head slightly, still wordless, her hair shaking down across her face. 

Was that negation, or uncertainty?

“C’mon, baby, what do you sense?” Willow urged gently.

Tara blushed massively. “Um…” she tried, and reached out again, hand hovering over the glow-ball. “It feels…” She hesitated, curling in on herself a little. 

God, what had so completely wrecked this girl’s self-confidence? She was obviously mega-talented. “What do you feel, Tara?” Buffy asked softly, and did her best to curb all her urgency. To shoot for quiet encouragement. She really did like the girl, didn’t want to quash her, even when the retiring thing made her impatient. Obviously Tara had been bullied or something, which made her a former victim and a total survivor. The last thing Buffy wanted was to be classified with the bullies in someone’s head just out of frustration. Also… she felt weirdly protective for some reason. And she needed all the talented people she could get on her team, so ixnay on the shutting down of the shy ones. 

Tara shot her an odd glance; one part wavering uncertainty and two parts willingness, then closed her eyes again. “It feels… defensive. Like it’s… waiting for something.”

Spike exhaled behind Buffy. “Well, whatever it’s waiting for, I don’t bloody well feel like hangin’ about with it. I vote for going back to that soddin’ warehouse to see what’s in there, love. Bustin’ down some doors, yeah?” He was vibrating with the need to do violence. Not that Buffy particularly blamed him. This was all going very slowly.

“I get that,” she answered, reaching back to touch his wrist, “but what I want to know is, what kind of thing is looking for a ‘key’ that’s defensive. How is a key a defensive tool? I mean, unless it goes to a door you can lock in its face, or…”

“Hell if I know, Slayer, but if this sonofabitch is attacking Joyce and wants it, I say we keep it from the bastard.” Spike shot a glance at Giles. “Got a safe, Rupert?”

“Well, of course I do, Spike. Any self-respecting person does who wants to ensure their documents and valuables are protected from fire and theft…”

“Put that soddin’ thing in it. Buffy and I can’t keep it safe and go after the prick on top of it, or we’d only be bringin’ the bastard its prize, yeah?”

Buffy eyed her guy warily. “We still have no clue what we’re dealing with. I mean, we know more about what  _ that _ is, but…” She forbore to mention that it was also approximately ten in the morning right now, and he would be in danger of turning into a crispy critter if they tried a sneak approach on that warehouse with the sun high in the sky. There was nowhere to park the DeSoto anywhere near it without announcing their approach, and no cover within yards of the place. Spike would, in his parlance, ‘parboil’ before he got anywhere near the door. /Why the hell did I give that damn Gem to Angel, again?/

She couldn’t go without him, either. He might very well drain her if she did. “Maybe we should at least wait till tonight, and spend the day finding out everything we can about this whatever-it-is…”

He stared at her in amazement. “Joyce is under attack and you want to…”

/Oh my  _ God _ ./ “You can’t  _ go _ right now, Spike, and you  _ know _ it!” It burst out of her in spite of her best efforts to hold back. 

He glared for a moment, then whirled away to fix frustrated eyes on the bookshelf across the room. Not too quickly for her to have caught his expression, though. He was beyond pissed, beyond helpless, and this close to losing it.

If Mom…

He couldn’t handle it if something happened to Mom. Especially if he could have tried to do something, and didn’t. If she…

He would  _ not _ be okay.

There were eyes. So many eyes on them. Spike must feel their weight like a physical thing. 

Buffy knew he might not respond well to a calming touch right now. He was jangling like broken guitar strings, and definitely not a huge fan of the whole having an audience thing right now. There wasn’t much she could do about the latter, but the former? 

She would risk it. “Hey,” she murmured, stepping closer, and touched his arm. “We’ll still do something. There’s always something we can do.”

His skin shuddered slightly under her touch, rippling visibly at the hem of his black tee. “Buffy,” he whispered, and his voice was tight. So tight. He was speaking through his teeth, but she could still hear the ragged edge there. The one that said he didn’t want to let the scared-angry tears fall in front of a bunch of spectators.

He was so very close to violence, to lashing out, if only to keep everyone from seeing him bursting into tears. “I know.” A light brush of just her thumb over his wrist, a squeeze of her fingers at the heel of his hand, to let him know she got it, and to lend strength. Everything in him was tight and jumbled and tangled and bright, ragged and shining on the edge. 

He felt like she did. /I’ve got you. You’ve got me. We’re a mess together./ “But we’ll think of something.” In the meantime, they really needed a daytime gym; somewhere to work out that was bigger than the crypt. The last time they had tried to spar in there they’d broken the sarcophagus lid and shattered two of those decorative vases, getting themselves covered in what Buffy really still hoped wasn’t ashes-of-people. Spike had gone and scavenged a new lid for his ‘daybed’ from somewhere before too long, but other than that…

Well, he probably figured there was no point in replacing things that were likely to get broken again. The vases had stayed gone. “Maybe there’s some kind of spell we can use to, I dunno…” Buffy halted, at a loss.

Xander’s voice interrupted, sounding excited. “There is! Listen!” And, when their eyes jerked to him, he was holding out his phone. 

“Um, okay?” Buffy queried, lost. Still holding Spike’s wrist, she blinked at her jazzed friend, nonplussed..

“Oh, sorry.” Xander pulled back the flip-phone, jammed his finger at the speaker button. Out of nowhere, Anya’s voice crackled out of the tiny speaker. 

‘…D you tell them, Xander? It really is likely to be very important. You know I can’t come over there; I’m stuck minding the gallery till six. And I don’t want Joyce to be ill again. She’s a friend  _ and _ a business partner. So please, let them know.’

“Ahn. Ahn! You’re on speaker. Go ahead and tell them yourself, because I  _ know _ I’ll mess it up if I tried to repeat all that.”

‘Oh. Excellent. Well, then. Spike and Buffy. There was a French sorcerer back in the sixteenth… I-don’t-know-what… named…’

“Cloutier,” Giles jumped in, sounding thoughtful.

‘So cute in his little knickers…’

Giles made a startled, choking noise.

‘But he had this one spell demons just hated, called  _ tirer la couture _ …’

Buffy frowned her way through that. “‘Rotate many foodstuffs’?”

Spike snorted, cool and amused along the back of her neck. “Your French is hopeless, pet,” he informed her, having apparently regained a little of his equilibrium in the interim.

“‘Pull the curtain back’,” Willow supplied helpfully into the brief silence.

‘Exactly. A spell to see spells,’ Anya chattered on through the phone. ‘Well, a trance to see spells, actually, but you get the idea. Try that. And do it quickly, because if something gets Joyce, I’ll have to ask someone to hurt you, and I don’t want to. I like you.’

/Thanks?/ Buffy was still having a hard time following how this conversational aside was helpful. Had Xander updated Anya over the phone while they were busy getting the orb-info from Tara, or what? “What do you mean, ‘see spells’?” 

“Well,” Giles put in, “all spells leave a trace signature. It's just not perceptible to the human eye. In this case, it could be the image of…” He hesitated briefly. “…A hand choking your mother, or...”

Spike snarled, low and deadly.

‘Or a cloud of mist around her,’ phone-Anya put in, unperturbed as ever by vampire-threats. Or maybe she couldn’t hear them through the crappy mic. Or she just knew she was too far away to be in the line of fire from where she was.

“Or maybe the shape of the demon that's performing the spell?” Willow finished pensively. She sounded almost academically interested in the whole concept, which was like… /Um, I get that you’re into this stuff as a clinical thing, but this is about  _ Mom _ ./

“Possible, yes,” Giles agreed, sounding just as thoughtful, and did they not all get that this wasn’t some… some puzzle to solve? That this was her  _ mother _ under attack, here?

Anya, blasé though she was tone-wise, sounded the most concerned of the entire bunch when it came to actual outcomes. Buffy was deeply grateful to the older girl for that courtesy.

Turning to Spike, Buffy let her eyes beg the question. She knew he badly wanted to go kick in teeth, and that being all Zen was so not where he was at right now; any more than she was. He didn’t have to support her in this, since she had no idea how she was going to manage to be meditate-y girl at the moment either, but it would probably go a lot better if she wasn’t feeling him off somewhere being all rage-y. If he could chill alongside her…

“Fuck,” he whispered, and nodded reluctantly. 

It was the exact opposite of what both their instincts told them to do. Which probably meant it was the exact right thing to be doing right now. “Okay, so I'll do what Monsieur Silk Knickers did. I'll go home, I'll get trance-y and I'll see what's affecting my mom. Spike’ll play meditation-support-vamp…”

Willow stared at them, clearly amazed. “You’re… You’re gonna do a magickal trance, Buffy? With… With  _ Spike _ helping?” And her expression, as it flicked up to take in the always-in-motion undead guy clearly read a great big ‘fat chance’. 

After all, from her point of view, Buffy wasn’t exactly magicks girl on a good day. Buffy wasn’t really sit-still girl at all. Rub some hyperactive vampire on that, and… “Look, Wil...”

She never got to finish. “Willow’s right, Buffy. There is great potential for this to backfire on you. The sorcerer Cloutier was legendary. His skills at achieving higher states of consciousness were…”

/Yeah, I’m not dumb, Giles./ “Better than mine?” she suggested dryly. “I get why you’re worried. But you know how hard I've been practicing…”

“Yes, of course. Your work with me of late has been amazingly more dedicated than in past years. However…”

“I know I’m close. And with Spike there to help me focus… With the link there to keep me on task…” She drilled her gaze in on her Watcher, felt Spike draw a little closer to have her back. “I mean, if he can enter the Dream with me, I bet he can help my concentration skills.”

She could see the doubt in Giles’ eyes as he glanced at her generally sort of ADD mate. Finally, though, he exhaled slowly. “If you believe you’re ready, then, Buffy.”

Probably he was counting on her to tame Spike down, rather than the other way around. He didn’t know how they worked. How they could cancel each other out; help each other to become still when necessary.

How he centered her with his voice of experience and his constancy, and she him with her anchoring to time, place, and sense of mission.

Buffy reached back, threaded her fingers in with Spike’s. His cool hand felt assured and firm in hers. “It’s  _ Mom _ . I’ll  _ get _ ready.” She turned to Willow. “What do I need?”

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
And I'll let you all imagine how THAT's gonna go down, hehe.  
(I just really couldn't resist trading out the useless boyfriend for the hyperactive one in the upcoming scene and seeing where my no doubt equally hyperactive imagination went with it, hehe. And I'll let that tantalize y'all.)


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trying to catch this one up.   
> So... yeah. Part two of that same episode; the established Spuffy relationship version. We'll see what y'all think.

Twenty minutes later they were back at the house, smoldering blanket cast off to one side over the corner of the bed. Mom was asleep in her room. Dawn was at school. Nothing to bother or interrupt them but the vague sounds of yard work from outside and the occasional car passing by on the street below. 

Spike settled down cross-legged opposite her, his back to the dresser, and helped her set up the stuff Wil, Tara, and Jonathan had pooled for their use. “You know I bloody well hate everything about this. Sittin’ still. Feels wrong.”

“I know.” She set aside the bag of incense, the other one of whatever weird-smelling, sandy powder, and handed him the little bundle of talismans. “But it’s all we have to go on. And it might actually give us some real information about the thing that’s coming at us, instead of just about some shiny ball that might not even be related. And,” she pointed out firmly, “this is for…”

“Mum. I know.” He inhaled harshly, let the breath out long and slow. “Christ, pet. What if…”

“I know,” she repeated, firmly setting out the stuff in the measured pattern Willow had shown them. It kept her from thinking too much about what they might see if they were successful. “Here, can you sprinkle the sand…”

“Widdershins, yeah, I remember.” Spike grabbed the bag out of her hand a little too roughly, shoved a fist inside to grab some of the stuff.

“That means…”

“Know what it means. Counter-bloody-clockwise. It’s an old soddin’ word, pet. I’m the bloody king of old soddin’ words, innit?” He inhaled harshly, then held his breath, and she felt him fighting for equilibrium; to steady himself before he started doing the deed. Willow had said it was important to be stable of mind and body before they began, or they’d ‘attract the wrong energies to the circle’ or something.

Buffy reached out to lay a hand over his tense, corded arm. “Thanks,” she told him softly. “I don’t… Look. I know this is weird. To do this, instead of just going out and…” She bit her lip, well-aware of what she was asking of him. “And I know you hate being a part of magicks…”

He dropped the sand back into the bag and set it aside. Closed his eyes briefly. And she felt the roiling vibe between them clear, right along with his heavy exhale. When they opened again, they were clear on hers. “Buffy, I’ll do bloody well anything, won’t I? I’m not the sort as draws a line in the sand and stands on it…” 

“Yes you are, if it’s important to you.”

He made a derisive sound, if a quiet one. “Well, alright, but not for shite like this. I do for people I love, so that’s going to bloody well win every time, yeah? That’s my ethic, not whether or not I believe in using a soddin’ spell. May not like it, it’s not like we’re castin’ the thing onto me.” He shook his head once, grimly. “Hell. I wouldn’t even bloody care if you needed to use it on me at this point. And, look. I was ready to do a love spell on Dru, wasn’t I?”

He had a point.

Azure eyes locked on hers, and his thumb drew a long sweep over her wrist. Pressed hard. “I’m here. Whatever you need, Buffy.” Lifting her hand, he turned it over, kissed her dead center in her palm. “It’s  _ Joyce _ .”

Releasing a shaky breath, Buffy nodded. “Yeah. For sure.” They could do this. “Okay. So. We make the circle…” She tried a little, authoritative nod at the bag he still held.

“Oh. Yeah. Right.” Shoving his fist back in, he scooped out some of the salty, powdery sand, and scattered it around her counter-clockwise. “What was it, then? Uh… All that foul or malignant be, go ye, go ye, begone from she…”

Buffy joined in the chant as he said it, though she replaced the ‘she’ with ‘me’. “And then I ignite the incense.” She did so, and somehow remembered her part of the chant while she lit them. “All that holds the will of this rite, come to this place, or leave my sight.”

Spike watched her through the tiny, wavering columns of smoke. “Just like to point out, Slayer, that you could’ve done all of this on your own.”

Buffy rolled her eyes patiently in his general direction. “Yeah, while you paced around outside the door making me nuts wanting to kill things? No. I want you in here where I can keep an eye on you and I know we’re concentrating on the same thing, or I’ll never get anything accomplished.” She reached over to grab up the talismans from the spot by his feet and studied the first one that came to hand. It was the one that looked like an eye. That went on the ‘east’ side. “Besides, I’m about to do some kind of weird astral travel thing.” She lifted her gaze to meet his worried blue one. “You’re… You’re my anchor. What if I can’t find my way back and I need you to, you know… tug me home?”

Leaning over, he kissed her lightly on the lips. “I am ever at your service, my love.”

***

It took a really, really long time to do this going astral thing.

For one, remaining still long enough to concentrate on one thing for that long was a serious test of her state of being in the first place, since Buffy was such a ‘do-er’, not a ‘be-er’. Being still was really not her forte. She went. She did. She didn’t contemplate. 

Not that this was really about contemplating, either. Past lessons in meditation-y stuff with Giles had taught her that she wasn’t supposed to even think about anything in particular. That was the tough part. Thinking was still  _ doing _ something. She was supposed to… what was it? Acknowledge thoughts as they passed through, pat them on the head and send them on their way without applying any emotion to them, good or bad. No shame, no guilt, no affection… just… Just little stray thoughts tripping along without a home. Certainly not a home in her. 

Which meant of course that they all came crowding in at double the normal speed, and bred like bunnies. She noticed  _ everything _ , and her brain wanted to comment on  _ all _ of it. That faint ticking noise from down the hall, because what the exact hell could that be coming from? They didn’t have a freaking grandfather clock, and probably she should go check that out in case it was something that might burn the house down, or was a clawed demon coming to eat Mom, or... No, too regular. Probably just the house settling…

Probably counted as thinking, yeah.

Stop that. No more with the thinky thoughts. 

Except there was the fact that she had never gotten around to taking that towel back to the bathroom, and it was probably going to get musty if she didn’t take it off the back of the vanity chair… Never mind, it was dry, it would keep, the window was open and airing out the room, and Cali had dry air, so things didn’t get musty, except now of course she couldn’t stop hearing the _whir_ of a car going by down on the street, and the _scritch-scritch_ of leaves from the tree in the side-yard brushing on the eaves of the house near her window, and  _ quit _ that! 

Focus on the quiet nearby, on the… The faint rustle as Spike settled in, and then the complete lack thereof—even of his breathing—as he went utterly still and turned into vampire-statue-guy on her behalf, and… Dammit;  _ Spike _ . Scent of Spike. T-shirt, freshly laundered here, downstairs, so he smelled like Mom’s-detergent-plus-Spike-smells, which made him even more hers, even more a part of  _ Home _ ; and that faint wafting of that last, nervous smoke he’d had on the way over, competing with the scents of what passed for autumn in California, drifting in from outside, and wending together with the odd, winding incense to sit heavily in her nose and to somehow heighten the ever-present buzzing of him all around and through her, in her blood and her solar plexus and out through the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet, making her arms and legs want—no,  _ need _ —to dance, to move because  _ he _ was there and…

And then he was in her blood somehow, stilling her; helping her to go quiet, and silent; a long, slow pressure almost like when he was laying his body all along hers when she was desperate to feel him moving in her and he just… stilled her with his cool weight, and murmured, ‘Hush, love… Take it slow, we’re not goin’ anywhere…’ 

Sucking in a long, slow breath, she nodded as if he had actually said something, and exhaled heavily into a slow, smoothing relaxation of shoulders, neck, arms. Shook herself out and stilled, the vibrations fading out into the quiet susurrus of just knowing that he was there, with her. Not somewhere being agitated. Here. Helping her to be… still. Which was amazing, because he was the least still person ever to exist, but…

Somehow, he was doing this, with her, which was…

Which was great, and it really worked, until she came up against the brick wall of realizing she had forgotten what to do next, and panicked a little, and had to start over to read and remember the words she was supposed to chant in her head. And then she felt uber-guilty to have to make Spike calm her down again, while he just smiled that little smile at her and told her to stop being a ‘barmy chit’ and to relax, because this would ‘no doubt take a good long while’. And they began again. 

And then some stupid asshole started up a lawnmower nextdoor, right when she felt like she was really getting it, and was about to slip into the chant.

And then Mom got up briefly and went to the bathroom, the flush of the toilet bringing her right out of the trance-state before she really got going, because what if Mom needed something, needed help, or…

And then  _ she _ had to pee, and had put it off too long, and there was no way she could do all of this and focus while waiting.

And each time she had to start over it was like the worst, most boring, irritating thing ever, and was something always going to happen? Because she could swear; this was like  _ edging _ or something!

“This isn’t going to work. Giles was right…”

“Just try it one more time, pet. You almost had it.”

She wanted to punch something. Like, really wanted to punch something. “Can’t we just spar? Doesn’t that count as meditating?” Damn, she was hungry by now, and Wil had said you had to do this stuff on an empty stomach, and crap; the incense was burning down to nothing, and she was going to have to start over for  _ that _ next, and could there possibly  _ be _ more setbacks…

“I’ll keep the incense going, love. Just go on, and worry about…”

The abrupt, shattering knock at the door made her jump so hard she almost had a heart attack. And then there was a smooshy, face-pressed-to-crack voice, echoing past the thin panel; an all-too-familiar one accompanied by yet another sharp pair of raps.  _ Knock-knock _ . “What are you doing?”

She was going to dismember her sister. Actually, literally rip her whole entire face off. Or, at  _ least _ all of her hair. Bloody scalp style. /Oh my God, you have the actual worst timing  _ ever! _ / “My boyfriend. Go  _ away _ .” 

Spike, the asshole, was chuckling. Of  _ course _ . Just shaking with it, face buried in one hand, eyes creased, the whole nine yards. 

Sometimes she hated the prick. “How is she already home from school?” Buffy hissed. “It  _ can’t _ be three already…”

Leaning back, away from the circle, Spike shot an assessing glance at the windows and sniffed the air. “It is. Been at this for hours, love.”

“Oh my God…”

“You’re such a liar, you know,” Dawn’s voice called mildly from the other side of the door. “I smell incense. Oooh,” she picked up then, “are you doing  _ magick?” _

“She’s doin’ me, Niblet,” Spike put in, and barely pulled back a snort of amusement that Buffy would have classified as a titter if she wanted to start a fight. “Now, get on…”

“Okay, ew. Are you guys doing some kinky magick-sex thing, because…”

The amount of time Buffy  _ didn’t _ have for this was off the charts. “Oh my  _ God _ , Dawn, will you just  _ leave?” _

“She really just wants to be close to you, love. Wants your approval.”

“I don’t want her _ approval!” _   
  
“See? She hates my approval, Spike. Go away, Dawn!”

“It’s an act. Someday you’ll both see that.” Spike turned back to the door. “Any road, you can’t come in right now, Platelet. No one in here is, uh, decent…”

“You’re never decent, but I know you’re dressed. And anyway, you’re so lying. You’re not  _ even _ cool enough for that sex-magick stuff.” 

Spike went back to the whole helpless-chuckles thing, because for some inexplicable reason Dawn tickled him to death. Buffy would never, ever understand it if she lived a zillion years. She herself merely groaned and closed her eyes, then determinedly reset the chant inside her head. /I’ll get through this if I have to fry my sister with my brain itself./

“For one thing, if you two were actually having sex, Spike wouldn’t be laughing…”

Buffy’s eyes snapped open in exasperation, concentration now hopelessly shattered. “That’s all  _ you _ know,” she shouted back toward the door. “You didn’t witness the great jeans malfunction of late June.” Her bitter sally was met with dancing vampire eyes, because he wasn’t the one trying to focus, the giant jerk.

“Whatever. He totally sounds way more breathy when you’re doing it…”

Spike abruptly closed said dancing eyes and actually managed to look, for a vampire, incredibly mortified.

“…And you wouldn’t sound like that at all, Buffy. You get all lazy and chill-sounding, not pissed off. And also, the bed would be totally slamming against the wall…”

“Go. Away, Dawn.” Buffy was going to start on fire. She was actually, literally going to burst into a four-alarm blaze.

Spike now had his face buried in both hands. She thought she heard him mutter something into his palms with the words, ‘the follies of youth’ involved in it somewhere.

“…Which is how I know you’re doing magick stuff. Can I watch? I won’t say anything. I’ll be all quiet and…”

“Dawn, I swear to  _ God _ …”

“Oh, come  _ on! _ Please, please, like times ten and cubed?  _ Please?” _

The door started to open, completely without permission. Spike was on his feet before it could go more than a crack, and long before Buffy had to launch herself out of the circle. He shoved it shut and leaned determinedly against it. “Sorry, Niblet. No can do. Got…” He faltered. “Got no bloody trousers on in here.”

“You are such a big huge liar. I just saw you in your jeans!” Now she was sounding seriously miffed.

Spike threw Buffy a totally weak look, like he was about to cave, because he was a complete softy when it came to her little sister. Buffy curbed him with a fierce ‘No way Mister’ glance. 

“Bloody hell. I, uh, pulled ‘em back on when you started in on us. But they’re comin’ back off soonest. Buffy’s orders.”

Buffy rolled her eyes at him. /Smooth, Spike./

He had the grace to look abashed.

“Okay, ew. And, fine. I can see when I’m not wanted.” Huge, stompy feet resounded in the hall. “Anyway, I could smell your stinky incense all the way down the stairs, you know. Your clothes are gonna reek. And if you  _ are _ doing magick, I am so telling. Mom doesn’t want you doing that any more than she wants you screwing in the house… which, by the way, I am so telling about the time I heard you two in there banging like a couple of bunnies when she was at the gallery doing that showing for Mr. Arthur…”

Buffy leaned over, ripped the towel off of the vanity chair, and threw it at Spike. It hit him in the face. Looking increasingly desperate, he whipped it around two-handed until it was a vague cylinder shape, and shoved it hard up against the foot of the door to seal off the crack, then rose to a sort of half-bent bow-shape. “Niblet,” he whispered urgently through the jamb, “I love you. Please. Don’t do that, or Mum’ll never let me in the house again _. Please?” _

A heavy, put-upon sigh. “Fine. But you’re being a massive jerk. You and your stupid girlfriend.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Pigeon. It really is very important. I’ll make it up to you.” He raked his hand through his hair, upsetting the mousse so that he turned into crazed curl-boy. “A date,” he grasped finally. “Just you ‘n me. We’ll go to a movie. What one you wanna see the most?”

The answer was prompt and unsubtle. “‘Blair Witch Two’. I wanna see if it’s even scary.”

Spike didn’t even roll his eyes over the stupidity of the movie choice. “It’s a date, Platelet. Tomorrow, yeah? Or the next day at the latest, depending on what we’re fighting. Only, please; don’t let on to Mum about…”

“Oh, jeez. I won’t tell her you guys boinked in the house. God, you’re such a fraidy-cat when it comes to her. I mean, that was a complete shot in the dark and you totally confirmed it. You’re so way careful, I never even heard you…” Clomping footsteps receded down the hall. The further bedroom door closed loudly.

Spike sagged against the panel he held, wide eyes turning to stare at Buffy in amazement. “Did she just…”

“You, Mister,” Buffy informed him solemnly, and closed her own eyes wearily, “just got played.”

Dead silence from her vampire, then… “Sodding fuck,” he whispered, sounding awed. “Christ, she’s good.”

“Or, you’re just whipped.”

“Bloody hell.” Returning to his station opposite her, Spike settled back in. “I’ve really no chance, between the three of you, do I?”

“Nope. Now shut the hell up and let me get back to work. I was so almost there.”

“Yeah. Sure. Right, then.” Man, he sounded floored. But he did shut up.

Sliding her eyes shut, Buffy picked up where she had left off in the meditation.

***

Eventually time lost meaning. The vibrating in her body ceased to matter, and fell away. The irritating jittering from sitting in the lotus position, the extraneous thoughts; all of it. At some point, Buffy slipped into what was either another awareness, or a lack of current awareness. Her surroundings did that thing where they faded away; or leaped into a sharper relief, but a strange one, where they were somehow both less important than ever and more a part of her than they had ever been. 

It was dusk. That was the first thing she noticed when her eyes un-shuttered without conscious volition. Across from her, Spike’s eyes remained closed. He wasn’t breathing; still as any statue, carven from marble. Vampire-in-repose, and as gorgeous as if he were an exhibit in a museum, lit by after-hours moonlight, draped in the modern accouterments of silken, lapis button-down, well-worn jeans, and woven-leather belt. 

Any other time, he would cause her mouth to water involuntarily just sitting there. Right now, though, she simply rose to her feet to eye him dispassionately. After all, he was but a part of her; inside her. She no more needed to touch him, rouse him, than she needed to count her breaths. He was as autonomic as her heartbeat. She could count on his presence as surely as she could bank on her next inhalation to come upon her of its own accord. 

He would remain behind to hold the umbilicus of her concentration as she exited to investigate the source of that which plagued their home and family. That was why he was here, with her.

Moving with a strange, underwater certitude, Buffy reached for the doorknob, left the room. Tread down the hall with slow, quiet strides. Hunting. It would not do to disturb their prey. Reached her mother’s room, lifted her hand to open the door. 

“Hey, Buffy.” The door opened for her, before she could touch the knob. “You okay?”

Buffy examined her mother’s form, seeking for anything untoward. Mom’s voice seemed to be echoing down to her as if from a great distance, but she looked… normal. Unexceptional. She was dressed and standing without any wobbling, her countenance free of pain or uncertainty. “Talk about a power nap. I know I said I felt fine earlier, but I guess I was more out of it than I let on. But I feel great now. Even though that new med obviously knocked me out.” A little, slightly depreciating smile. “They weren’t kidding when they said the thing is nicknamed ‘dopamax’. I’m honestly a little worried what’ll happen when they up the dose. But I’m not dizzy anymore, and I don’t have a migraine, so there’s that.”

Buffy frowned, examining her mother from head to toe. 

There was nothing.

Nothing.

Mom’s expression turned to concern as she did up the top button of her rust, paisley blouse. “You okay, Buffy?”

“Nothing.”

“Hm?”

“There's nothing.” It didn’t make any sense.

“Buffy, are you sure  _ you’re  _ alright?”

Buffy caught a flicker out of the corner of her eye, turned. Her vision tunneled in on a family photo on Mom’s nightstand, and she stared, arrested. It was a newer photo, taken last summer by Xander on Anya’s urging using his new work-phone, because it had one of those really new camera-phone things on it. The photo had been taken on the front porch, just after the sun had moved away from the front of the house. In it, Spike stood hunched behind the three of them, his face and hair tinted reddish by the low, sunset light and sort of squished between Mom and Buffy, with Dawn in the foreground, all wrapped up in one long Spike-arm. Spike’s other arm was wrapped around Mom’s body to crush her in against Buffy; a chance, Spike had insisted, to see himself holding ‘all of his girls’. They had wanted to see if the new digital photography tech would capture a vamp the same way as the old kind would. Spike had been incredibly pleased with the results, and so had Mom, who had insisted on getting a copy of the picture once they had found out that Rite Aid would print digital photos from cell phones. 

Everyone was grinning dopily in the picture, like a bunch of idiots. And Dawn, the goofball that she was, had her arms spread wide and was acting like she was going to slide down the porch railing and fall off if Spike even thought about letting her go, because she was a giant, clumsy dork.

Except in this pic, Dawn was sort of flickering in and out of the image, like she was in the process of falling right out of existence. Like there was some sort of bad reception in the cell phone when the photo got taken, so that she kept fizzling in and out of reality every second. Every time she vanished, it looked like Spike’s arms around her instead, very naturally, contained nothing but Mom and Buffy, which was…

Just, what? Could digital pictures…  _ do _ that?

No. That didn’t make sense. If you took a picture of something, it was either there or it wasn’t, right? Unless…

/Unless it really…  _ wasn’t _ ./

/Unless it’s not really there. Unless it’s not really… real./

“Are you sure you're feeling okay? You seem a little out of it.”

_ Blip _ . Dawn.  _ Blip _ . No Dawn.

“Buffy?”

_ Blip _ . Dawn again. “Yeah. I'm fine.” With an effort, Buffy dragged her eyes away from the photo to regard her mother. “Long day is all. I’m glad you’re feeling better.” /You have  _ no _ idea. Except… now…/

_ ‘They come at you through your family…’ _

It had never once, not in a million years, occurred to her that that might mean planting… something…  _ inside _ her family. Something… not real, to… To…

/To attack us from within./

Buffy had always felt, deep inside, that she was meant to be an only child. That having Dawn there felt unfair, and wrong. That having to share her mother with Dawn was some kind of odd imposition. She had always felt horribly selfish about that feeling, of course, and written it off as some kind of leftover older-kid jealousy at having been pushed out as ‘the baby’…

“You're so grown up.”

Buffy dragged her eyes away from the photo to blink at her mother. Mom was watching her with a strange, wistful expression. “Wh…”

“Can you and Spike keep an eye on Dawn? I need to go check in with Anya. Capitalize on actually feeling better for a change. I haven’t really looked in on things at all today, and only doing it by phone feels really wrong.”

Buffy opened her mouth. As if reading something in her expression that worried her, Mom rushed on before she could speak. “I know, I know, I should take it easy till I get used to the new med, but I promise, I won’t overdo it. I don’t feel woozy right now, and I promise I’m okay to drive.” She sounded like she was reciting an expected litany. “And I know, Anya’s got it under control, but I’ll sleep better tonight—if I can sleep at all after a nap like that—if I just pop my head in the door and then talk with her a little about how things are going. Call me a control freak, but it’s still  _ my _ business…” 

Actually, Buffy would rather have Mom way out of the house right now, and nowhere near that… whatever it was masquerading as her sister. Not that It had done Mom any harm that she knew of so far, but what if… /What if the tumor was… Dawn? What if all this… What if it was because…/

_ ‘They come at you through your family.’ _

Buffy would be more than angry right now, more than enraged, if the trance—and straight-up shock—didn’t have everything in her numbed to some strange feeling of destined certitude.

Right now, what she needed to do was to confront the imposter. To  _ act _ , while Mom was away. “No, I think that’s a good idea. You should go about your life and be as normal as possible. Don’t let this thing get you down, you know?”   
Mom blinked at her as if she were surprised at the lack of babying, then gave a firm nod. “Exactly. Thank you, Buffy.” Reaching for her purse, over there on the haunted nightstand, she nodded again, as if she were trying to convince herself, then headed for the door. She laid a hand on Buffy’s shoulder as she passed. “Alright. I’m heading out. Tell that boyfriend of yours… Sorry. Husband. I keep forgetting, and God, does that ever sound weird, and I’m not going to remember it at  _ all _ until we do some kind of ceremony. And it’ll probably always freak me out; at least for the first five years, and I’m not going to apologize for that.” 

Buffy was way too numb to even know how to respond to something that, a couple of hours ago, would have been cause for some fun banter.

Mom was probably a little alarmed at the lack thereof, seemed to be fishing for it. “Anyway, tell him to take it easy on me when I get back, because he’s way too overprotective.”

Buffy nodded, still feeling way too distant. “I’ll tell him.”

Now clearly concerned at her preoccupation, Mom shot her a worried look, voice full of uncertainty. She didn’t ask, though, because she had long since learned that she would hear about ‘Slayer-stuff’ on an as-needed basis. “Okay. See you later, Sweetie.” And she squeezed past Buffy to head past Dawn’s doorway, past Buffy’s, and down the stairs. 

The front door  _ whooshed _ open,  _ clunked _ shut. 

Silence.

Buffy stepped into Mom’s room, lifted the damning photograph in its cheap, decorative frame, probably bought in bulk from Big Lots. Dawn continued to flicker in and out of the image, like a weird magician’s trick at a cheap magic show in Vegas. Setting it down with numb fingers, Buffy turned her gaze to the vanity, where Mom had tucked any number of other photos—a habit she herself had inherited from the previous generation—and checked for the same phenomenon. 

Dawn flickered in and out of frame in every single one.

Decided, firm, ready to dispose of the danger, Buffy turned and strode resolutely toward the room that held the imposter. The… whatever-it-was posing as her sister. 

She opened the door cautiously, without knocking. 

No Dawn. 

Well, all the better to investigate, before she located the… The danger, and did away with it. 

What she saw in the room blew her mind. 

Everything flickered.  _ Everything _ . One moment she noted a familiar setting. Dawn’s bedroom, complete with ye standard teenybopper décor, familiar to Buffy from her own not-so-distant freshman days; posters of NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys on the walls, the one huge print of a sunflower behind the bed that Dawn had supposedly received from Mom back about five years ago as a birthday gift, because she’d fallen in love with it. Pretty jewelry boxes, the brass bedstead, the stuffed animals stacked all over the messy, unmade coverlet.

_ Flicker _ .

The bed wasn’t at her left anymore, had migrated completely across the room. It was now shoved up against the far right-hand corner, the space beneath it and around the foot piled high with boxes and canvases and art-prints; gallery storage stacked willy-nilly throughout the space with a narrow avenue between door and divan to allow for a walkway. A few canvases leaned against the wall atop the bed as well, but it was free of random items for the most part on the surface, which was an odd choice for what looked like mostly storage space… and the bed itself was neatly-made. 

Stunned, Buffy let her eyes range on, and… There was a folding table under the window, instead of a dresser, heavily laden with what looked like an aging Singer sewing machine—a  _ sewing _ machine? Since when did anyone in the house  _ sew? _ —and a bunch of Tupperware tubs full of what looked like long-unused craft supplies, covered in dust. The window was also different, Buffy noticed, sporting a heavy blanket draped over the rod instead of gauzy, girly curtains. 

And the closet. Damn, the closet was telling. Sprawled wide-open, it held not a bunch of girlish camisoles and blouses and slightly-belled linen pants, but instead a wealth of what looked like… overflow Spike clothes? 

Buffy would recognize those button-downs anywhere, all in cool jewel-tones, and since when had Spike ever used this room for  _ anything?  _ But there, beneath the shirts, scattered on the floor of the closet, lay more boxes, this time labeled things like, ‘albums’ and ‘concert memorabilia’ in Spike’s back-slanting, serif-laden left-hand script; as if he had long used this room as backup storage for things he didn’t want to entrust to the crypt’s somewhat temperamental humidity… or as if he had even on occasion made it a habit to stay here, and had never once stored anything downstairs or slept on that cot down in the basement. 

This… This was, in some other dimension, or timeline, or something, a part-time, unoccupied storage room… and part-time as a guest-bedroom for when Spike stayed here. But just as clearly it was only for show for a Joyce Summers who knew all too well that when Spike stayed here he was going to end up in bed with Buffy once she shut her door and all the pretenses had been observed; and, just, wow.

What reality was this?

Stymied by what she saw, Buffy stood with one hand on the door and stared. She was shaken to her core by this evidence that everything she had ever known—about her family, her relationships, everything—had just been upended. 

And then she heard it. A familiar voice—her supposed kid sister’s voice—echoed to her ears from down the hall. “Buffy?”

Buffy felt herself swinging around in a circle, reacting as if everything was absolutely distant; like she was sailing on a far sea, and the world was an island thereon; as remote and uncharted and untouchable as a deserted shore. “Dawn.”

The word sounded foreign to her ears, tasted like ashes on her tongue.

_ Blip _ .

Fade out. Everything in the room—posters, stuffed animals, dresser, all gone. And Dawn; gone with it. A guest room. A craft room, filled with Spike’s stuff.

_ Blip _ . Fade in. Dawn, back, along with all of her supposed possessions. 

“Who said you could come in my room?”

A filthy lie. 

Buffy didn’t even want to look at this…  _ thing _ , could barely keep her eyes focused on the once-loved face. Had to, to remind herself of what It was. No way she could hide from It; from the reality of It, to spare her mind. And yet… The sense of betrayal, of disgust, of horror and outrage and… just plain soiled invasion was beyond description. 

/You are  _ not _ my sister./

The fading in and out was alarming. It strained the eyes, upset the stomach, made the mind uncertain. Buffy knew nothing would ever be the same again. It made her voice cold. It made everything cold. “You're not my sister.”

Dawn… whatever It was, crossed her arms and looked offended. Offended! “Yeah! Like I even want to be related to your nasty self…”

Something broke in Buffy; something beyond tired of the game, of the deceit, of the whole insane farce of it. She was across the room in a flash and grasping the arms of the Thing masquerading as blood. /‘They come at you through your family.’/

/ _ Hell _ no. Not this time./ 

“Ow! What are you  _ doing?” _

“What  _ are  _ you?” she heard herself demand, incensed. /I could rip your arms off. Would it even hurt you? Would it do  _ anything? _ /

/Are you even really  _ here? _ /

“Get off of me!”

And then Spike was there, out of nowhere; flying in through the doorway of a room that should have been his, to interfere; because he didn’t know, he couldn’t see it, he was still under the spell, still loved this… this  _ thing. _ He had sensed her disquiet, her alarm, and it had broken into his own trance-state to bring him rushing in to see what was wrong, but he couldn’t see the reality alongside her, because though he had shared in the edges of calm, the trance was hers alone. “Buffy! What’s going on?”

Of course he tried, automatically, to pull her off of the Thing they had called ‘Dawn’. 

Buffy didn’t let him, did not relent. He had no idea what they were facing, and she had no time to explain that he had been taken in by some kind of… simulacrum, or... 

She shook him off, shoved him back toward the door with a thrust of her shoulder so that he stared at her in shock.

Dawn—the Thing—merely watched her as if utterly unsurprised, because of course she—It—wasn’t. It knew Its cover was blown. 

It was clearly evil. “You want to hurt me?” Buffy demanded of it, and in spite of herself, in spite of the trance, fury was beginning to rise in her; to march across the quiet calm of the meditation-state.

“Buffy, what the bloody hell are you…”

No crying, no attempt at dissembling. Not even a wobbly lip. Just a cold, gelid stare.

It incensed Buffy, broke through her trance-driven calm. She shook the Thing.

For the first time, it showed emotion, if only a matching, rising anger. “Let go of me, you freak!”

“Then you deal with  _ me _ ,” Buffy informed It grimly, and threw It away from her, into the wall. It stumbled, rebounded, glared at her less in shock than with hatred.

“Buffy!” Spike exclaimed, clearly horrified.

The Thing lifted Its head to pin Buffy with a satisfied stare. “I’m telling Mom!”

Something rose inside of Buffy, clawing up from her belly into her throat; something driven by pure, righteous rage and horror. If this Thing  _ ever _ touched Mom again, she would  _ kill _ It. It didn’t matter that It still looked like something that, deep in her heart, felt like a sister, raised twinges of automatic love and bonding and… “You stay  _ away _ from my  _ mother _ .”

Spike was staring at her as if he had never seen her before. “Buffy, what the bloody hell…”

Buffy knew she was heaving her breaths as she turned for the door. The Thing remained behind to glare at her, very obviously making plans to go after Mom. Buffy shot It an unyielding glare, ignoring Spike’s shock. He didn’t know. She would have to explain it to him, though how she could get him alone without It hearing her plans was a conundrum. She needed to, though. She needed him to watch It while she…

The moment was broken by the sharp, unexpected ring of the phone down the hall, in Mom’s room.

Buffy shot Spike a pointed look. “Stay here. Don’t let her leave.” And turning away, she marched off down the hall, well-aware that Spike would probably go to It and offer comfort. That It might very well use this time to try to convince her mate that she was nuts or something. But she would deal with that later. Spike could never be completely convinced to turn against her. He was  _ hers _ . It would be alright. If he wanted to ease his mind by offering succor to the enemy… Well. Right now, without the full 411, he was within his rights to do so. Buffy would understand. 

He was still where she had been an hour ago. It was in no way his fault. 

Of course, once he understood that that Thing was a danger to Mom, he would be on her side in a flash, ‘Niblet’ or no.

She picked up the phone on the third ring. “What?” She so didn’t have time for interruptions.

‘Buffy?’ Giles’ voice rang over the line. ‘I’m ever so glad to have caught you. We have news regarding the sphere.’ He sounded slightly dithery, like he was concerned about whatever had driven him to call. ‘I think we may have underestimated what we’re dealing with…’

“Oh, I  _ know _ we have.” Either the big bad was already in her own home, attacking her from within and pretending to be family (and maybe it was what gave her mother the tumor?)… or the big bad was some kind of incredibly powerful mage or something, capable of placing an agent within her family to attack her from within (and, possibly ibid). Either way, mega not with the okay, and also mega-powerful mojo. 

It all added up to some of the worst badness she had ever experienced. They had a hell of a fight on their hands. 

_ ‘They come at you through your family.’ _

‘They’ were gonna die. Painfully. “What else have you found?”

She kept watch as she listened, to ensure that the Invader wasn’t approaching down the hall. Luckily It seemed content with hanging around bending Spike’s ear, because It wasn’t hovering at the doorway or anything while Giles filled her in on the latest research. ‘It's called the Dagon Sphere, and it has a history going back many centuries…’

After all these years, Buffy knew how to cut short a Giles-research-rant and keep him to the ‘what does the Slayer need to know’ point. “What’s it do? Was Tara right about how it pulls power from the core of the Earth or our dimension or whatever and uses it?”

‘Yes, I would say so. It’s clearly a protective device, used to ward off ancient primordial evil…’

/Shit, shit, shit…/ Eyes drilling down the short stretch of hall, as if she could see through the half-closed door a few feet away, Buffy knew her voice was cold as ice when she answered. “Any word on what this evil looks like?” /As in, is it my ‘sister’, or is this Thing here just a tool the Big Bad Evil’s using to throw me off the scent?/

‘Unfortunately, no. This is where… This is where accounts get vague. All we've managed to uncover so far is the Dagon Sphere was created to repel “That Which Cannot Be Named”.’

/Oh, great. This just keeps getting better and better./ 

So either “That Which Cannot Be Named” had been living with them at Revello for who knew how long… or It had placed the Thing there with them for some indeterminate period as like some kind of animated, part-time, phasing, living videocam or something, to spy on them. /And, maybe as a side-benefit, It’s also making Mom sick to distract us, because she’s the only pure human in the house and so she’s the weak link and attackable. All while we had no idea all along… and dammit, we need to go back to that stupid warehouse or factory or whatever it was and find out if there’s anything in there. Stat. Because I need to know if what’s living here is That Which Cannot Be Named, or just a flunky, and I need to know  _ yesterday _ ./

Shit, and she so couldn’t bring Spike. He had to stay here and keep an eye on Da… the Thing, in case Mom came back home before she got back. Because It knew Buffy was on to It now. It was compromised. Which meant… who knew what It might do to Mom if It was left alone with her in the interim?

/Nope. No way. You gotta stay, Spike. I’m so sorry, but I need you to protect Mom./ If there was only some way to tell him.

And that was the single most difficult part of this whole equation. How the hell could she convince her guy that it was necessary he stay behind? That he should hang around and, in effect, babysit what he believed was a perfectly capable fourteen-year-old girl while his mate ran off to possibly throw down with something called “That Which Cannot Be Named”? /It’s not like I can tell him what’s going on right in front of that Thing, or It might just psychically report back to the boss or something—if It’s not actually the boss itself—and let It know I’m coming, or…/

Shit. She would have to think of something, fast. But in the meantime… “I'm going to go back to the factory or whatever where I found it. Whoever planted this doohickey's got answers, and we need ‘em.”

There was a short pause on the other end of the line, then, ‘Buffy, you've heard me say this before, but do be careful. Anything that goes unnamed is usually an object of deep worship or great fear; maybe both…’

“Uhuh.” Buffy was already halfway back to the warehouse district in her mind’s eye; variously planning a frontal assault or a sneak-attack, weighing her options, deciding which weapons to bring…

‘Have you completed the trance? Seen what's harming your mother?’

/Yeah. That. Long story short.../ How to tell him without being overheard? “That's the thing... I just saw…”

The door opened wider. ‘Dawn’ stepped out, Spike at her heels. Piercing, illegible, oceanic eyes stared at her, chill and narrowed.

Buffy broke off abruptly, assessing. 

‘Yes?’

/Fuck./ Lifting her eyes to Spike’s questioning ones, she fought to pass him the information that what she was saying to Giles was patently false. “Nothing. It didn't work.” And, keeping her face suspiciously blank, she jerked her gaze sharply at the Thing masquerading as her sister. At the least Spike would hopefully read her tense anxiety, her body language, her expression and her visual ‘gestures’, and pick up that something was wrong with ‘Dawn’, something he needed to watch for. 

He would probably think she was saying that it wasn’t Mom but his ‘Niblet’ who was under attack or being possessed or whatever. And that was fine, as long as he was on his guard around ‘her’. /I’ll take it./

She saw something like comprehension flood her guy’s features, his sharp, azure stare go wary as he eyed the crown of gleaming, brunette hair before him. And she saw the flood of regret there; of worry, of concern, saw his hand rise as if touch the tense shoulder before him, drop. 

/Good enough./

Without ever once removing her gaze from the imposter, Buffy dropped the phone back into its cradle and stepped out of Mom’s bedroom. 

“What are you talking about?” the Thing prodded sharply.

/Oh, sure. Like you don’t already know./ “Slayer stuff.” She flickered her eyes away from the supercilious glare to meet Spike’s, trying with all her might to telegraph to him her desperate need that he stay. “I'm going out. Spike’ll stay with you.”

“Like I need a babysitter…”

Shock. Amazement. Not a little betrayal. “Buffy, what…”

She couldn’t. Couldn’t even deal. She had to pass them to head for the stairs, and that was going to be the worst, facing down Spike’s confused, accusing looks, that  _ Thing’s _ uncomfortable surmises. 

But it had to be done. 

She started for the head of the stairs, stomach churning and body tense as she passed the gauntlet. As she drew even with them, Spike’s eyes charged on her profile and their link trembling with the dragging pull to stop, to explain, the imposter’s voice broke through the remains of the trance. “Do you really think I care that you're the Slayer?”

Pictures, flickering all along the walls. The invader, appearing, disappearing and reappearing, sickeningly, over and over again, amidst the riot of outdated wallpaper; a nauseating reminder that her sister wasn’t real. ‘Dawn’ wasn’t real.

It had never been there. It never would be. 

/I don’t have a sister.  _ You _ are a danger. A weapon. A plague, or…/ 

Stopping abruptly, horrified and certain that Its words were some kind of hint, some kind of threat, Buffy turned to face the Thing down. “What’s that supposed to mean?” /Do you think you’re stronger than me? That you can take me? That if I try to fight you you’ll be able to take me out?/

She was answered with an emotionless, cold glance, wordless, Its very existence a threat. 

Buffy had fought robots. This Thing seemed just as sociopathic, in that moment. 

It made her shiver. 

She flickered her eyes away, up to meet Spike’s confused gaze, desperate on hers and begging for some sort of explanation. “I'll be home in an hour.”

“Buffy…”

She couldn’t. There was no way. No safe way, at least. “Please.”

He closed his eyes briefly. Opened them, indigo and clouded with concern, on hers. Their link jangled with uncertainty. “Alright, Slayer.” But he was dying to go with her, have her back. To demand an explanation. Anything.

None of it was anything she could afford to give. Not now. 

Though it tore at her, Buffy turned away again, marched down the hall. She would have to be quick, before the thing decided to take Spike out, come after her. Not that she didn’t have all the faith in the world in her partner’s Slayer-fed abilities, well-honed by a hundred years of training and fighting the world’s top predators, but still. He was her mate. Call her crazy if she didn’t like leaving him behind to keep something like this contained; an unknown quantity for which he had a clear soft spot.

He had no idea what he was facing; even less of a one than she had. He would hold back at first, if it struck. He might…

“Mom’s coming back.”

The emotionless voice caught her with one foot lifted to take the stairs, set a shiver running down her spine. It sounded like a threat.

The only weapon Buffy had right now was to sound hard, unwavering. Unfazed, even if the very thought of Mom returning while this thing remained behind in this home, knowing It had been found out, made her heart flinch, made her quail inwardly. 

Buffy didn’t turn, did not give It the satisfaction of altering her trajectory or her tone in the slightest. “I'll be back first.”

She started down the stairs. And felt the agonized pang at her solar plexus, from her confused mate.

She had to give him something. And in that moment, she knew what to say. It came to her, like divine inspiration.

Turning her head to meet his fear-darkened gaze, she did her best to communicate all she could in one line. “You were right,” she whispered. “We should have finished this right away.”

That way he would at least know where she was headed. What she planned.

It would have to do.

At the door she caught up her jacket, snagged a carefully-hidden sword from behind the planter just outside, on the porch, and departed.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Please all of you give massive snuggles to wolf_shadoe, who helped me feel confident in my storytelling abilities while I essentially retold an episode from within a character's head and hoped to give it some weight/feel/scare-power, despite the fact we all know exactly what's going on and what will happen next.   
  
and thanks to all of you, because you're wonderful!


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for **still** being backed up on comments-replies. So sorry! I sort of got sidetracked, in that because of my other current fic (and because my brain thought it was necessary in order to "see" the next bit I'm writing on this one), I got utterly shoehorned over into a side-project, and have been, ah, neck-deep in a Ripper/Rayne prequel that is not only helping me to understand Giles better than I ever have before, but is also currently completely ruining my entire life. (I've been damn near crying, it's not fair, what happened, Why, just WHY, GAH!)
> 
> Alright, now that that's out of my system (she lies), let's get on, shall we?

After a year, it felt strange in the extreme to head into a fight without her partner at her side… but sometimes, she supposed, she would have to do it like this again. 

She was, after all, still the Slayer. One Girl and yadda, and it was so much fun, being all Chosen-y and having big bads come in to attack your friends and family. Except… /Not this time, buddy. No way./

Not for the first time, as Buffy wended between the unguarded warehouses, she partly envied Faith her personal ‘One Girl’ approach. No friends, no family… No weaknesses.

And then she thought of Spike, back there guarding Mom; taking care of everything that was important to her. Watching her back, no questions asked, on sheer belief in her, and knew she wouldn’t trade with Faith for any money. Because to be alone, without weaknesses to guard, meant no love, either.

/I guess I still have the better end of the deal./

She studied the chained-up gate for a moment, then gazed through the fence to eye the building beyond. Somehow, though it looked like nothing more than an abandoned former factory, the boxy two-story structure managed to seem forbidding. And that was all on its own. The trance-y mojo had long since faded on her trek through town, here across the tracks from friendly suburbia to the warehouse district. 

It shouldn’t seem so, but it also added to the sense of foreboding that there was also a light within, tonight, up high in the one large window, glowing through the wide, scummy-looking plate glass and around the edges of corrugated tin. Someone was obviously home.

/Alright then, let’s see what’s behind door number one./

Snapping the lock on the gate with little to no effort, Buffy yanked the chain-link portal ajar just enough to slip through and stepped into the yard with hardly any clatter, then darted across the yard to make for the smallish man-door to one side of the large, garage-size one below and slightly offset from the huge window. 

The door was not locked. 

Her very first thought up on entering was that she had gotten way too used to having a vampire at her side and relying on his catlike visuals in the dark, and that she should have brought a damn flashlight. The second was that she should Slayer-up and employ some of her long-unused skills and instincts, like her slightly-better-than-human senses of smell and hearing (and maybe vision?) to suss out what the hell she was walking into, because in the absence of said vampire partner, she still needed to get the damn job done. /I can’t always rely on Spike to do what I have to do. Maybe I’ve let myself go soft, always having him at my side. And that’s so not okay./ Maybe Giles had a point when he was always laying into her for not patrolling on her own sometimes so that she could keep her skills all edgy. 

/Fine; whatever. I’ll concede that one to you tomorrow, Mr. Watcher-Dad-Guy. If I wake up and I’m not killed to death by this rando bad-guy-of-the-week, because I’m probably also way too used to fighting with someone watching my left, and to having someone to guard my back or whatever./ Not that Spike always did that. He spent a hell of a lot of time leaning back against buildings watching her work—see last night as people’s exhibit A—but that was with ye standard, garden-variety demons. When it came to throwing down with the seriously threatening monsters, he was always right there at her side. She had no doubt come to rely on having that kind of backing, was less used anymore to flying solo, improvising, keeping her own ass alive when she had no one else to fall back on. 

/Hopefully it doesn’t get me dead tonight./

The warehouse-slash-former-factory was very much with the empty. She didn’t bark her shins or run into anything. There was a lot of wending through musty corridors and wandering through vast, echo-y, open spaces full of dust, but eventually she located a rickety, clanky old spiral staircase heading upward to what she hoped was the second floor. She took it as quietly as she could in the gloom, then proceeded along what felt like a metal-grate kind of a platform in the direction of the window where she had seen that faint glow earlier.

One corridor and a turn later, the glow found her, dull on the walls, and she was confronted with what looked like damage from a bomb. Something that had once been double doors—tempered steel, no less—had been blown inward by some kind of massive concussion, and were all torn and ripped-looking, with shrapnel dangling from their serrated edges. The hole was person-sized, which was handy, if worrying. 

Buffy stepped cautiously through the wreckage of the vast implosion, both to avoid damage to her flesh and in order to watch around her for possible attack, and assessed the space in which she found herself. 

The windowed area was a broad, deep, wide room, lit by some diffuse glow, the source of which she couldn’t pinpoint right away. Everything that had once been in the room had been shoved off to the sides, up against the brick walls; a bunch of weird, industrial debris like metal shelves full of crap, and who knew what other garbage. Buffy didn’t have time or interest in cataloging it if it didn’t have any bearing on her sitch. Off to the right, there were some concrete pillars holding up the ceiling and piercing the floorboards to head all the way down to the ground floor. Same on the left, where they created a little alcove. The light originated from there; a sort of eyot of warmth in the chill, unwelcoming reality of the stark space. She thought she glimpsed a hanging industrial lamp, a camp stove, and maybe a pallet? 

And there, way in the center of the awful, empty room, there stood a single, cheap metal office chair, like a forbidding statement. A warning, even, since tied in the chair was a man in a scratchy-looking brown robe, with dark brown hair, his receding hairline decorated with blood. The latter was easily seen, since his head was dangling like he was only maybe half-conscious, if that. 

/Just great./

Unless there were more lies going on, she doubted this was their big bad. He was, however, very clearly meant to be bait. 

Ah well. Best way to flush out the real culprit, Buffy supposed, and after casting about her once more with her senses for a threat, she headed across the floor with a theatrical shrug. After all, why not? /Might as well get this show on the road, right?/

She did, however, keep her hand on the pommel of her sword, seated comfortably at her hip in the frog she preferred, which simply looked like a decorative part of her belt. It tucked almost invisibly into most of her shallow girl-pockets, and was subtle enough to be barely noticeable under most of her shirts as long as she bloused them out. Well, as long as she avoided carrying the sword in them, of course. That tended to blow one’s cover as a general rule.

As she approached the brown-robed guy, he made what looked to be a massive effort and lifted his head a little to eye her. His first expression was a defiant sort of fearful determination, but that bled immediately into… worry? 

“Hey there,” she opened, then caught a glimpse of his face. “Oh. Woah.”

Dude had been seriously worked over. 

Also, he didn’t necessarily look happy to see her, which you’d think he would be, what with the possibility of rescue and all. He also didn’t look surprised, which, weird much? 

Oh well. 

Senses on the alert for an approaching baddie, Buffy went into restraint-loosening mode. “It was you who planted the Dagon Sphere, right?”

Incomprehension turned to terror on the man’s battered face, his bruised eyes widening as he stared behind her. Which was fine. She had already sensed the approach of something big and bad behind her; a serious wallop of ‘something wicked this way coming’. “I got it,” she attempted to reassure monk-looking dude. 

He didn’t get it, now rigid with dread as she left his freed hands to work at loosening his leg-bonds. “Don't worry.” The hairs on the back of her neck were at this point doing the prickly dance of ‘it’s practically on me’. She would have to whirl around any second. “I'm stronger than I look.”

Any second now…

She got his legs free. “I have had experience with stuff like this before.” Tugged the ropes off of his chest. He was loose. “Best of all...”

Up abruptly and spinning, Buffy caught the approaching baddie by the throat, and what the fuck? “I’m not stupid,” she announced coldly as she assessed the threat.

It was a  _ chick _ . In a fire-engine-red dress and heels—heels!—and nothing else. Like, no pantylines, no bra, nothing; and since when had she ever fought a baddie that was a chick?

/Well, Faith, but still./ 

Also, the extreme relief that it wasn’t Dawn was so massive that Buffy almost let go for an instant.

The apparent big bad of the hour gave her a weird, withering look… and to Buffy’s shock, wrenched her hand away with exactly zero effort. Buffy was still staring in surprise when the backhand blow came, striking her so hard she didn’t even realize she was flying through the air until she fetched up across the room to impact the furthest wall. 

It jarred her everything, knocked the wind out of her. Holy fuck; that was cement. And the fucking crazy bitch had thrown her hard enough that it had  _ cracked _ it! 

Buffy coughed a little, catching her breath, and did a fail since she also inhaled some cement-dust while she was at it. Coughed again, pushing herself to her hands and knees. She hadn’t even felt the falling-to-the-floor portion of festivities, she had hit the wall so hard. And… fuck, her face hurt. And her neck, too.

Lifting her hand briefly to her cheek, Buffy shook her head to check her vertebral integrity and shake the vision back online, resettled her spine, and blinked the bitch back into focus. One slinky-dressed ho, check. Monk-looking dude, check; still in his chair, looking like a scared rabbit and too afraid or too beat-up to flee. Great.

Who the fuck was this bitch, anyway?

Well, whoever she was, she was seriously tough. Buffy hadn’t taken a hit like that since…

/Well, really, since ever. Not even Faith can hit like that./ 

/Hell; not even Spike can hit like that, fresh from a nibble on yours truly./

/Fuck. I might be in trouble this time./

The blonde ho tilted her head slightly, watching Buffy with only vague interest, like she was examining a chipped nail or something. “You sure about that last part?” she queried, sounding barely curious, and even a little amused.

Okay, time to bring the knife to the fistfight.

Buffy yanked her sword out of her belt and held it before her, prepared. Whoever this bitch was, she probably couldn’t live with a yard of steel sticking out of her chest. Most things would at least have to take a minute, anyway. “Sure you’re not armed and I am.”

“Oh, honey,” the blonde bitch answered, striding forward, “you’re cute.” She walked, literally, right into Buffy’s sword. It hit her full-on in the solar plexus… and broke off. 

More than that, it fucking  _ shattered _ , like it was made of candy-glass on some movie set, and what the hell was this bitch made of, titanium? Diamonds?

/Dammit, I  _ liked _ that sword!/

Also, the skank-ho didn’t even slow down. She kept right on going until she was right in Buffy’s face, and  _ grabbed hold of her hair _ . Like, really? Fight like a girl, much? 

“Ow. That tickled!” And before Buffy could do anything more than anchor her fists over the other bitch’s hands, she slammed Buffy against the wall again, so hard the back of her head felt like it dented a little against the concrete. 

Buffy felt her brain and her teeth rattle with the impact. Her vision whited out a little again. 

/Well, shit./

Releasing the fists in her hair, she made with the automatic uppercut. To little effect, except blonde bitch shook her head slightly, then let go of the fairly excruciating hair-hold to grab Buffy’s shoulders instead. Noted; she had long-ass fingernails, which was of the suck. 

“I just want you to know...” Buffy felt herself whistling through the air, still held tightly in two long-nailed hands. And then she was slamming into one of those stupid support-pillar-things. “…The whole ‘beat ya to death’ thing I'm doing?” A few pummeling blows to the torso, too fast for Buffy to block, and seriously the heaviest hits Buffy had ever taken in her slaying career. “It's valuable time out of life that I'm never gonna get back.”

The blows were moving upward. Buffy got a block up in front of her face, did a ‘the best defense is a good offense’ and slipped a few blows of her own in, edgewise. 

The bitch took exception to this, of course, grabbing her arms and wrenching them downward. And holy fuck, she was strong. That hurt like hell. It almost felt like she was about to know what it felt like to enjoy a nice dislocation of both shoulders. 

She couldn’t help whimpering a little. Which was nice, to show weakness to an enemy, and who  _ was _ this bitch, anyway?

Leaning right into her face, crimped and permed and nowhere to go stared into Buffy’s eyes with a strange, gleeful expression, then grabbed her at the neck and waist. “Wait, I've always wanted to try this. You know that thing with worms where if you have one, you rip it in half, you get two worms? Do you think that'll work with you?”

Buffy had been in tough spots before. She knew how to judge her enemies on strength. 

This one was strong enough that she had no doubts the batshit bitch could follow through with her threat, and with no more emotion than if Buffy was, in fact, little more than a worm. 

She was in serious trouble. Time to get loose. No time to waste wondering if it was possible to escape the bitch’s grasp, either, since it was do or die. 

She wasn’t going to get out by ye standard struggling, that was for sure. She was being held so tightly it was amazing those nails had merely broken skin. And, no, they weren’t press-ons. Also, Buffy rather doubted they’d break off very easily to set her free; not if a sword broke off against the psycho’s body like it was made of spun glass. 

Time to make with the distractions. 

Accordingly, Buffy reacted swiftly as she could to avoid telegraphing her next move, and slammed her head directly into the crazywoman's whorish, made-up face. 

It hurt like hell, but it worked. The grip on her shoulder and hip loosened. The bitch gave a shocked—if, unfortunately, not really all that pained—yelp as she dropped Buffy to the ground.

Buffy backed off, hands held at the defensive.

This was a losing battle. She needed to regroup. Grab monk-guy and get the fuck out. Go find a bazooka or something. /We never gave that one rocket-launcher back. After all, it’s not like you can just knock on the gates of a military base and say, ‘Hey. Uh, here’s this antiaircraft deal we borrowed. Sorry. We had a supernatural Judge to take out. Thanks.’/ 

Good thing, too. It would come in handy right about now. /Hopefully Xan remembers where he stashed the thing./

Backing toward the chair in the center of the room, Buffy reached behind her. “Listen,” she began, fumbling for the itchy-looking brown robe on monk-guy. If she could just drag him to his feet, she could maybe get him moving. He could stagger his way out of here, and then she could bail herself. She was seriously outclassed in this fight without some kind of spectacular hardware, which was, dammit, an incredibly naked feeling for a Slayer… but if she could get this guy moving she would only need to distract bitchface for another few seconds. /Just stay out of her grasp. She has a grip like a vise at one of Xander’s construction sites; the hydraulic ones./ “I need you to get up and get the hell out of here while I...”

There was a crash, and the marauding, scarlet-clad bitch on approach staggered slightly with impact as a hunk of metal shelving bounced off of her. And the familiar feeling of  _ mate _ slammed into Buffy, hard and tingly and full-bodied; like putting on a suit of fizzy armor when you were naked as a jay.

It was the greatest relief she had felt in a damned long time, and it left her empty-bellied in terror. “Spike!” she shouted, horrified. “What the hell are you doing here? I need you at home with Mom and Dawn!”

“Dawn’s fine,” he answered briskly, hands up in a defensive posture. “Mum’s still out talking with Vengeance about the shop. You needed me. Getting your arse handed to you by whoever the bloody hell this is…” His eyes were hard and glittering as he took in the sight of their newest big bad. “The fuck is this, anyway? Some kind of sodding fashion victim?”

“Oh, you’re dead, vampire,” the bitch answered, looking him up and down. “And anyway, who invited you to crash my fight scene? I mean, I know you guys are bad at social niceties, but just  _ barging _ in here to interrupt our little conversation? What were you raised in, a  _ barn? _ ” Exhaling in a huff of amazement, she swiveled to glare at Buffy and shook her head, like she was all incredibly affronted. “Is it yours? Because seriously, if it is, you need to teach it better manners. Calling _me_ a fashion victim! I mean,  _ look _ at it! Why is its  _ hair _ that color?”

Buffy straightened automatically as Spike circled widely to join her, landing at his accustomed place to her left. Fine. Whatever. He was here now. Nothing to do but make the best of it; and for sure, she felt better with him here at her side. “I think he’s pretty,” she informed the crazy bitch, and returned to her combat crouch. “We’ll talk later,” she hissed at her guy as he mimicked her pose, taut and wary. To her endless gratitude, he had a mace in his hands. She hadn’t noticed it till just now. That duster was a lovely thing, and could hide a whole plethora of weapons as well as a multitude of sins.

The bitch came swaggering in, arm cocked back. They separated to come at her the way they always did, Buffy feinting to draw her fire while Spike came in from the left and behind to swing his spiky monster of a weapon.

Predictably, it shattered on impact. Dammit.

Still, it got their new friend’s attention. Spinning in amazement, the crimped blonde stared at Spike as he danced away, apparently unhurt but slightly shocked at his temerity. “You  _ hit _ me! Are you  _ crazy? _ Vampires don’t get to hit me! I mean, do you even know who I  _ am?” _

This was so not happening. “A seriously irritating end to our day?” Buffy opined as she circled, Spike back at her side, to keep themselves between skank-ho and the monk.

/Maybe if we both go in briefly, but keep out of range as much as we can. Alternate, keep her guessing, and then, while she’s going after one of us, the other one can smuggle this guy out…/ 

Darting in with a quick uppercut and then out again while the ho was still eyeing Spike, Buffy used the moment to telegraph her plan as best she could to her guy. 

It was really the briefest—and most spare—of eye-and-gesture conversations they had ever managed, but Spike nodded his understanding anyway, which said a lot about their unspoken communication.

Wordlessly, they pressed the attack then, striking and kicking for all they were worth; first Buffy and then Spike, causing the ho to turn first one way and then the other. That way she couldn’t grab either one of them before the other was coming in. It kept them both free from those deadly headlocks and grabs… but it didn’t seem to damage her much. Their blows really only seemed to offend her more than anything, and could she even be injured?

At best they were maybe able to force her backward a little, away from monk-guy, and that only because she was seeking some kind of vantage from which to pulverize the both of them equally. “You can't go around hitting people. What, were you born in the cabbage patch? And where did you find this guy? He’s kinda hot, in a too-much-leather, arrogant, James Dean kinda way…”

And she ignored Buffy’s next strike to pick Spike up and throw him, hard, into the further wall. 

Fuck.

“Still irritating, though.” 

Buffy felt the impact as if it were her own as her guy hit the brick wall; as it crumpled around him, bricks and mortar cascading down to thrash his body. Damn if she didn’t know how that felt; even if he didn’t have breath to lose. /Oh no you didn’t, you bitch./ 

And, okay, maybe she took too much of a chance on the next roundhouse, exposed herself a little, considering she didn’t have her partner on the other side this time to help distract the ho from grabbing at her.

Swinging back around faster than anyone should really be able to do, bitchface blocked Buffy’s next strike and tried a straight-punch for the jaw that might’ve caved her head in if Buffy wasn’t ready for it. You had to adjust for the combatant’s fighting-style; in this case, unbelievably fast, incredibly tight, insanely powerful.

Mostly, it was about predicting, and compensating. 

In other words… “Duck, Slayer!”

She was already doing so. Kind of at the last second, but it worked, and bitch-ho punched into the concrete pillar supporting the ceiling instead of through Buffy’s forehead, which was infinitely preferable. 

What wasn’t was her swift recovery and recalculation into a grab for Buffy’s throat. Out of nowhere Buffy found herself dangling neck-first a good five inches or so off the ground—damn, the bitch was tall, too. It wasn’t all the heels—and regarding her with tilted head as if studying some kind of odd, talking mold while Buffy slowly strangled. 

“I just noticed something. You have superpowers. That is  _ so _ cool.” The arm holding Buffy drew back, causing her to gasp even harder for oxygen while she lay over the choking fingernails. “Can you fly?”

And then she was sailing through the air again—dammit—reflecting in that split-second of awareness that at least it was nice to be able to take one quick, desperate inhalation before she landed, hard, on the floor next to monk-guy, who had to be dying or something, considering he hadn’t even tried to, like, crawl away from all of this insanity. Dude was still sagging there in his chair, a crumpled mess. 

Not that Buffy was much better at the moment. She was pretty sure her legs weren’t precisely broken, but she really was a dazed, bruised wreck by now, and would be for some time after this fight. 

Not for the first time, she kind of envied Spike’s ability to heal in a few minutes with the right kind of blood. /Why can’t I do that with, like, a five-egg quiche, or maybe even a superfood shake?/ 

She could choke down some spirulina if it meant she could heal even faster. Or some of that stuff Mom was so into for a while there, with the ugly mushroom culture thing she’d grown on the top of the kitchen cabinets, because the mushroom’s pee was supposed to be the healthiest thing on the planet? Kombu… something.

Struggling to her feet, Buffy straightened as she felt her guy limping over to her side. “Get him out of here,” she gasped.

“Yeah,” Spike agreed. “But just how the bloody hell are we supposed to do that with that bitch standin’ between us and the soddin’ doorway?”

Buffy cased the room once; a swift, all-round glance, then pinned her eye to the window.

Spike followed her gaze and sighed heavily. “Fuck.”

“Keep him alive.”

“He better bloody well be worth it. I’m already nursin’ a couple broken bones, Slayer.” Grabbing up the monk, Spike threw the guy unceremoniously over his shoulders and made a dash for the plate glass. 

Glory seemed nonplussed at this abrupt change of pace. “Hey! Hands off my holy man!” And she started off in pursuit.

Buffy stepped between the raging bitch and her vampire, and straight-punched the distracted ho right in the throat. Eyes on Spike and the vanishing monk, the bitch staggered just a little. She hadn’t expected the attack, wasn’t paying the slightest attention to Buffy anymore. “Oh, get out of my way,” she began, sounding bored, and picked Buffy up preparatory to tossing her aside.

In the air for the third time and already prepared for her next flight, Buffy heard the shattering sound of a breaking window behind her. 

“No! That’s just… How  _ could _ you! That’s the worst kind of manners, stealing someone’s monk! I mean, really, what the hell makes you think you can just waltz in here, send your vampire after my…”

The bitch might just twist her head off out of frustration. Buffy did the only thing she could think of. She kicked the ho in the side of the fluffy, blonde skull. 

It would either get her dead, or get her dropped. 

Luckily, bitchface was leaning more toward the previously-observed pattern of irrational, shocked irritation than venting her frustrations on the object closest to hand. At least, as of yet. As Buffy had hoped she would, she threw the distraction away from her, toward the thing which had most offended her moments ago.

Sailing through the air this time was actually the best possible outcome. Covering her face with her arms to avoid collision with any jags of broken glass, Buffy whizzed through the open window-hole and out into the night, arced down through the shards and over through about twenty-five feet or so of night sky, toward the asphalt below. Her only thought as she approached the tarmac was, /This is really going to friggin’ hurt./

Right before she landed, she had an unexpectedly distinct view of Spike, just below her; a pale-haired blur scrambling out of the way with the monk in his arms, so that she wouldn’t crush the guy when she landed…

And then, somehow, she crashed down on relatively soft vampire; a much more welcome surface than macadam. Her breath, of course, whooshed out of her, so that she could only croak, “Wh…” without form, while his arms tightened around her and he muttered terrified-sounding, pithy things about mad bints, and, “Should go back up there and kill that fucking bitch; you okay, Buffy?”

“…Monk…” Buffy managed to gasp, breathless. Damn, that hurt. 

“Still alive. Christ, pet..." A wincing noise. "I think you broke all the rest of my ribs." She winced with him at the thought. At least they could fix him up quickly. Though... he didn't need to search for air, the lucky punk. "And that fucking slapper’s no doubt on her way down here to…”

From upstairs, they heard the sounds of some very inventive, high-pitched cursing, and what sounded like a resounding stomp. 

Buffy glanced up, vision clearing for the third time in half an hour, saw an hourglass figure with too much permed hair framed in the broken glass. In her upraised hand she held what looked like a broken, high-heeled shoe. She was cursing voluminously.

“Shit,” Buffy managed, dumbly. /What the hell  _ is _ she?/

For the record, it really sucked to have the wind knocked out of you three times in one night.

“We need to get the hell out of here, pet,” Spike put in in apparent agreement.

More cursing and stomping noises. It sounded like their newest big bad was having a tantrum in there.

Forcing her inside-out diaphragm to function, Buffy dragged in about one-quarter of a pained breath and struggled off of her guy to gain her feet, then held out a hand for Spike. He rose with slow care, clearly injured, then nodded at monk-dude, who was gasping even more than Buffy where he lay amidst a nest of glittering window-remains. He was covered in new cuts and really just looked like he was on death’s door. 

“Shit,” Buffy mentioned again.

“Best get him away, you reckon?” Spike asked. “At least out of sight…”

A screech resounded from inside the building, then a vast rumble.

And the whole upper floor collapsed, a huge cloud of dust poofing out of the broken window like a mini, billowy demolition. 

/Well, that’s helpful. At least it might slow her down a little./

“Nice,” Spike muttered, and looked away to bend over the monk. “Maybe the barmy bitch is dead.”

Shouldering gently past him, Buffy shook her head and moved to lift the monk as gently as she could in her arms. “I doubt it,” she managed, now capable of breathing again. “If a sword shattered…” Gasp. “...Trying to go into her, I’m pretty sure she can survive…” Oxygen. “...A building-collapse.”

“Point.” His voice was bland, but Buffy knew her guy. That was his worried tone.

They hoofed it toward the gate, Spike ready and willing to help carry monk-dude, though Buffy was pretty sure he was almost as damaged, what with the whole breaking-the-fall-twice thing. He opened the gate a little wider for her, grunting as he did so, then jerked his chin toward the now-silent warehouse. “Think she’s our dimensional big bad?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” They moved around the corner, and all Buffy could think as he set the injured monk carefully down against the nearest stretch of unadorned chain-link, was, /At least it’s not Dawn./ Though, it still begged the question of what the hell Dawn was… And right now, she was back at home, with Mom on her way there, and… “Yay, huh?” She stared down at the broken human in their care. In the vague wash of reflected streetlamp-light, he looked like death warmed over. “Spike, not that I’m not grateful that you came, but why’d you leave Dawn? You know that she’s…”

He had been studying the monk at her side. At this query, his eyes rose to meet hers, and he frowned. “Seen possessed folk before, luv. Niblet’s not. Dunno what you saw in the meditation, but she was scared. Scared of you.” There was the faintest note of accusation in his voice. “I calmed her down, then came when I felt you in trouble…”

/She got to you./ Well, it was always going to be a risk. They would have to deal with it later. It wasn’t like Buffy could berate him for it. He didn’t have all the information. “It’s not a possession. But we’ll deal with it ASAP.” She dropped her eyes back to their damaged informant. “Okay, guy. Rest time’s over.” She made to pick him up again, but he rolled his head against the fence and gasped out two thickly-accented words. “No. Please.”

Buffy hesitated. “We have to get you out of here. In case she comes after you. A little thing like a building falling on her isn’t going to stop her, whatever she is. She’s going to keep coming. We need to get you to the hospital, and we need to find out what you know…” 

The man let out a pained gasp. “Then… I will tell you. I will not… have time for…” A choked gasp. “Must… now. My journey is… done, I think.”

Denial swamped Buffy. She shoved away the ick. “Oh, don’t get metaphor-y on me,” she told him briskly. She didn’t have time for this guy to die. She needed answers. “C’mon, let’s…”

Spike caught her by the arm before she could bend and drag the poor man into her embrace. “Won’t do to cart him about anymore, Slayer. Sod’s bleeding internally. Pulse is wonky as well. Won’t make it to hospital.”

/Well… shit./ “I’m sorry we didn’t… find you sooner,” she heard herself say, regret filling her. He had probably been in there since the night previous, getting worked over by that bitch while they flirted and worked on the mystery of the Orb of Dragon or whatever it was called, and… 

Well, getting Mom to the doctor was obviously important, but still. 

The man made a face that might have looked like a dismissive smile, if it didn’t come out more like a wince. “No,” he whispered… and then pinned her with a fevered gaze. “You have to...” And his hand rose, grasped her arm just below where Spike had, his fingers clammy and nearly as chill. “The Key,” he gasped, intent and anxious. “You must protect… the Key.”

“Yeah. Sure mate. We’ll protect your key. Got it right in our bitty coven with our mates, safe as houses…”

Monk dude didn’t spare her guy a glance, eyes burning on Buffy’s as if she held the secret to life, the universe, and everything. 

/Oh. Right. He doesn’t know./ “That orb thing isn’t the key, Spike. It’s something called a Dragon Sphere…” She patted the monk’s hand on her arm. “But it’s okay, guy. We can protect this key of yours, okay? Let’s do it together, huh? Just… c’mon. Let’s get you out of here; far from here, and then we can…”

“Many more die if you don't… keep it safe.”

/Okay pessimist./

“Alright, what the bloody hell is it, if it’s not that soddin’ sphere thing?”

/My question./

“The Key is…  _ energy _ . Is a portal. It opens the  _ door _ ...”

Buffy was about as done as Spike felt with all this mumbo-jumbo metaphysical bullshittery. She had always hated this kind of language, which was why she left the research to everyone else. She just didn’t have the  _ time _ to parse crap like this. /Just give me the damn bottom line!/ “The door to  _ what?  _ What the hell are we  _ looking _ for?”

“All doors.” A pained gasp, hitched at the end as if someone had punched him in the gut, and damn. Accent or no, he really did not sound so hot. “For centuries… it had no form at all. My brethren… its only keepers. Then… the Abomination found us…”

/The abomination? Is that that bitch upstairs, or Dawn, or…/

“…We had to  _ hide _ the Key. Gave it form… Molded it flesh...” Shadowed, dying eyes fixed on Buffy’s, frenetic and haggard and burning with belief. “Made it  _ human… _ and sent it… to you.”

/Made it… human? What…/

Spike made a sound, like someone had socked him hard in the throat. A dull shock of some kind of realization pounded through him to leak into her, tearing her eyes from the monk to stare at him. “Wh…” she mouthed.

He looked incredibly pale, the lines around his eyes deeper than she thought she had ever seen them. “You’re fucking lying,” he whispered, and his  _ voice _ . 

Buffy recoiled at the harsh threat she heard in his tones. “Spike, what…”

And then it hit her. The call. The flickering photos. The not-a-possession. The other piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit. 

“Dawn.” The name exited her lips almost without her own recognizance. She didn’t realize she had sat down hard on the tarmac until the chill of it began to seep through the seat of her jeans. 

“She’s the Key…”

“The hell you say.” Oh, god, Spike sounded deadly. But for an entirely other reason than…

Buffy was so in another place than he was. He had gone to murderous rage at the slandering of his beloved Niblet. Buffy, though, was in a state of shock that anyone would  _ use _ her, use her  _ family _ like that. Is that what had caused her human mother to get so sick, magically reordering their lives like that to… to create the mental space for… “You put that in my  _ house?”  _

/I’m the Slayer. And because of what I am, someone just decided to… To…/

If her mother had suffered a possibly fatal illness because she was the Slayer, then… Then that was  _ it _ . She was  _ done _ . Just, done.

“Buffy, this is rot. This is some kind of soddin’ trick. I dunno what you saw, but you can’t trust this prick! The Niblet is… the Niblet! She’s your sister! She’s no bloody key!”

/Oh God./ “Spike…” She was shaking now, both with the backwash of his furious denial and with the rising strain of her own horror. 

“We knew the Slayer would protect.”

“Bullshit.” But Spike was wavering, now.

“My memories,” Buffy heard herself whisper, and felt her gorge rise with it. “My mom’s? Spike’s? All of our…” Holding her the day they brought her home from the hospital. /Mom and Dad looking at me with so much pride and telling me I’m the big sister./ Helping her learn to brush and braid her hair… /Watching her play with the dolls and bears she inherited from me; she got everyone but Mr. Gordo…/ Sharing music, teaching her about boys and boy-bands… /Singing every word together on road trips. Trying to drown out Mom and Dad fighting in the car by holding the hair brush, passing it back and forth in the back seat, belting out Madonna and Cher songs.../ Cooking together with Mom before moving to Sunnydale to start the gallery, when Mom was between classes at UCLA and that one oogy secretary job she'd hated so much. / _ ‘Don’t throw flour at me, you little dork! Oh, you’ve had it now!’/  _ Splashing together at the beach, trying to get away from the irritating baby to hang out with boys at the Santa Monica pier. Being trailed by a little sister who looked up to her like she was god. /Dripping with ice-cream-ooze and sticky from head to toe because I tried to buy her off with a cone, totally hero-worshipping me. Calling me ‘Bubby’…  _ ‘Bubby, can you take me swimming?’ ‘Bubby, can you bury me in the sand?’ _ / 

And then here, in Sunnydale. Dawn, following her through Restfield. Angel, scaring her off that one night.  _ “Boo! No little sisters allowed. I can’t _ bel ieve _ you brought her here, Buffy.” _ As if she would have done that on purpose. And later, Dawn, telling her all about watching Spike inexplicably hanging out with Mom over hot cocoa, while she dangled over the banister of the stairway; peering around the corner to stare at the blond vampire in already-blooming fascination.  _ “Man, he’s so  _ cute _ , though,  _ she'd informed the horrified Buffy later.  _ "Why are you hustling him out like that? Like, if you’re gonna hit on a vampire, why don’t you hit on him instead of Angel? I mean, seriously, he’s so much more…”  _

_ “Ugh, Dawn, he’s  _ Spike! _ He doesn’t have a  _ soul! _ And he’s… He’s…”  _

_ “Incredibly hot, and nicer to us; and with the leather, and the cheekbones, and what’s your  _ problem? _ You don’t like sexy? Rather have moody and boring guys who act all weird and don’t know how to smile?” _ And then watching her blush and squeal and run up the stairs like a delighted rabbit when Spike, lifting his head at this, had grinned at the youngest Summers from Buffy's armlock.  _ “Has a point, doesn’t she, then?” _

/Oh. My.  _ God _ ./ “All of our memories…”

“We built… them.”

They  _ built _ them?

This time it was Spike’s turn to plunk down on his ass on the street. “Bloody… sodding… christing… fuck,” he whispered, sounding like he’d been hit in the head with a freight train.

Buffy wasn’t stunned. She was  _ pissed _ . This was her  _ life _ —this was all their lives—being completely fucked with and rearranged just so they could… install this… this  _ entity _ there for her to protect it, completely without permission or consent or… And what if it had harmed Mom to do this to her? What if her brain couldn’t handle the download? Though, none of the Scoobies had tumors yet… /But they also didn’t have an entire lifetime’s worth of memories suddenly crammed into their skulls, either, only a few years’ worth, and…/ “Then un-build them!” she heard herself demand, beyond pissed. “This is our  _ lives _ you’re…”

“Buffy,” Spike broke in, and strangely, he was using his caution-voice, if strangled.

She ignored him, ignored the hesitant warning building in the link between them. “This isn’t right, and there’s no way…”

Out of nowhere, the monk started to cough; thick, wet, racking spasms that sounded like something was tearing inside of him, and oh, fuck. 

When they finally cleared up, his eyes found hers again, watering and agonized, but certain. “You cannot abandon.”

/Oh, like hell I can’t./ Buffy opened her mouth to tell the dying bastard so… and was halted when she felt Spike’s hand, light on the crook of her elbow. His emotions, a whole tangled myriad of them, exploded into her. Too many to parse, but one was foremost, and that was devotion, as sure as anything was, with him. As always.

“Buffy. She’s still the Niblet. She’s still…”

/No. Damn you. I can’t  _ hear _ this./

She shook him off. “I didn't  _ ask  _ for this! I don't even know...” /How can I even accept…/ “What  _ is _ she?”

Dull, dying eyes, locked on hers. “Human. Now, human; and helpless.” 

/No./

“Please. She is… an innocent in this.”

/Not possible. Not when she looked at me like… Like…/

“She needs you.”

/ _ No _ ./

_ “Buffy.” _ Spike’s voice, his feel; all of him was urgent now.

Something broke in Buffy; something young and pained and still disbelieving. Agonized, even, that had wanted to believe, deep within, that this all was just some cruel prank. “She's not my sister?” She hadn’t meant to ask it; certainly hadn’t meant it to come out in that pleading, broken tone.

“She doesn't… know that.”

/Oh… God… And I just went up there and… And  _ terrorized _ her…/

From somewhere close to hand and at a great distance, Spike was muttering, “Christ…” in that tone that said he badly needed a cigarette.

There was a low, squeezed-sounding wheeze, with a little rattle at the end of it that almost sounded too tired to be there, and the night air with its odors of old rubber and asphalt and creosote was cut with the sudden sharp scent of urine. Buffy knew the monk had died, couldn’t bring herself to look at the body, even to close the eyes.

The world and everything in it had been, in a very real sense, turned upside down, and nothing would or could ever be the same, for any of them.

Not ever again.

***

“I had a Slayer-dream,” Buffy told Spike softly as they headed back to Revello. Her voice broke the dread silence between them for the first time since the monk had spoken the words that had destroyed their world. “Back during all the mess of graduation. Faith…” She closed her eyes, hands shaking a little in her lap, and stared down between her knees at the edge of the DeSoto’s vinyl seat. “I should… call her. See if she had the same dream. Maybe the one she had was a little different, if she had it at all. Maybe she has… more info, or…”

“What did it tell you?” Spike queried as quietly. His voice, though, trembled as much as her hands.

Buffy forced her mouth to move, her voice to exit, her lips to spell out the words even though it all seemed insane and impossible now. “Something about a countdown, and someone coming, I think?” she closed her eyes, remembering looking at her bedside clock, and how ominous it had seemed. “‘Little Miss Muffet’.”

“Along came a spider,” Spike put in, and he sounded exceedingly bitter as he said it. “Somethin’ coming along, hovering, lyin’ in wait to terrify or harm a little girl who’s oblivious, or just minding her own...”

“Except I don’t think this bitch is here to just scare Dawn away.” Buffy felt all the more bleak as she said it. And, damn, she had been getting dream-warnings about this particular big bad for a  _ long _ damn time. 

Which meant… this one was  _ major _ .

Not that she hadn’t already realized that, what with the spectacular kicking of her ass that had just occurred. Hers and Spike’s put together, which was just unheard of, and… “How are we gonna beat this bitch, Spike?”

Spike remained silent for a long moment, eyes on the road, then, “Anything else in the dream? Or any other dreams since then, might give any clues?”

Buffy frowned with it. “Just that the countdown was from ‘seven-three-oh’, whatever that means. And that whole thing with the glowy portals. And the one you were in…”

Spike worried at his lower lip a little, then, “Think you should call the other Slayer tonight, pet. After we see to Dawn and Mum. See if she has anything else. And then we ought to figure out the bit with the numbers, if we can.”

Buffy nodded reluctantly. “Guess we better let the gang in on…”

“No!”

She was startled into staring by his very vehemence; even more so when he pulled over abruptly in the dark to glare bloody murder at her from the side of the road. “Wh…”

“We don’t tell any of them, Buffy,” he insisted, voice harsh.

“But,” she began, blinking, “we need their help to…”

“Oh,” he put in, relaxing slightly, “we can tell ‘em all about big bad bitch, sure. Faith as well, I reckon. An’ they all know she’ll be after this Key of hers; the lot of ‘em. They already know it.” His eyes found hers, aflame in the dark and sparking amber. “But they don’t hear about Dawn.”

She opened her mouth, a soundless ‘o’. And then it percolated. “Because if any of ‘em get caught by Ms. Home Perm Two-Thousand…”

“We can even say we have this soddin’ Key of hers put by safe, if we want. Whichever way you wanna play it, Slayer. But no one but us knows it’s the Niblet, yeah? Only way to keep Dawn safe; and Mum.”

He was right. He was definitely right. And it was so much pressure on just them, to keep and protect a secret like that, with no backup. And god; if she didn’t have him to help her with that, how would she have ever gotten by, all on her own? “I love you,” she informed him, almost under her breath. She knew he would hear it anyway, and that he would hear the vibrant certitude with which she said it.

His hand dropped to cover hers on her thigh. “And I bloody well love you, Buffy, but what…”

“I don’t know how I’d do this without you. I don’t even want to think about it. I’m so unbelievably glad that you’re here. If we hadn’t…”

His eyes focused on hers in the dark, like lasers. “Buffy, you would never be without me, even if we had never come to this. I would always be at your left shoulder, doing my damnedest to support you, back you.” His eyes canted over to meet hers, dark in the night. “I’m yours. Have been from the first bloody moment I saw you, so might as well put that aside and look to how we’re going to manage this latest madness.”

His saying it just made her love him even more. But he was right. They needed to get back to business. “We go home,” she agreed. “I talk to Dawn, patch things up with her while you check in with Mom. We find a way to institute some kind of stealth observation mode on both of them, but mostly Dawn, to keep her under protective custody, or at least surveillance, all the time from here on out. And, I guess, then I step outside and call Faith…”

Spike nodded. “And I’ll phone Watcher, tell him we have news…”

Buffy narrowed her gaze on his battered face. “And somewhere in there, we bandage each other up, and get you something to eat, because you look like hammered dogshit.”

A faint grin lightly touched his split lips. “Ta, luv. Always a boon when your lady tells you you look bloody awful.”

She lifted her hand to cup his perfect, thankfully unbroken cheekbone, ran a caressing thumb along the dried tracks of blood trailing from his nostrils. He’d reset it somewhere in the interim. “Honorable battle-scars earned in the line of duty are hot,” she reminded him, and leaned over to lightly kiss just the tip of his nose. He winced a little anyway, an expression she caught as she backed away. “It’s a good thing you’re always fast at doing this,” she informed him softly, thumb laid just next to the injured feature. “You’re too pretty to go around with boxer’s nose.”

“Yeah, well; for some bloody reason, everybody in the soddin’ world wants to break it all the bleedin’ time.”

Buffy sighed and dropped her hand back to her lap. “Yeah, you’re probably numb by now,” she answered, and leaned her head back against the low back of the seat. God, the whole of her ached. Head, neck, temples pounding, knuckles, shoulders, spine…

“You keep tellin’ yourself that, pet,” Spike informed her sardonically, and put the car back into gear to drive them home.

When they entered the house, still a little dazed and confused by all they had seen, heard, been hit with, et cetera, it was to find Mom sitting on the couch with Dawn. They both had their feet curled under them and were looking cozy, Mom holding a mug of tea with a bag haphazardly slung over one side instead of lightly looped through the handle the way Mom tended to do it to anchor it at the edge. Dawn had made the cup for her then. She had been trying her teenaged best to nurture their mother while Buffy was out. Like she probably did every day when her big sister was away at school, and…

And cue Buffy feeling like an enormous asshole for treating the youngest Summers like a terrifying, invading thing, when Dawn… 

/I didn’t  _ know _ , though. I thought she was some monster sent to attack us! I had no idea that she had no idea what she was, okay?/

Dawn, of course and understandably, froze and went from happy kid to cold, angry, hunted being the minute Buffy swept through the door with Spike in her wake. “You’re home!” Mom called, sounding pleased.

Dawn was not pleased. Shoulders taut, she got up without a word and marched around them to head for the stairs. “I wasn't bothering her,” she insisted in a tight voice as she passed, but Buffy heard the edge there, familiar as if it had come from her own throat. 

Her manufactured sister was on the verge of angry tears.

/Oh, damn./ 

It made her own throat tight, because this wasn’t fair. None of this was fair. It was confusing and wrong and…

Spike’s hand, falling to her shoulder. Mom’s voice, confused in the low lamplight of the room. “What was that all about?”

Buffy hesitated, eyes following the young girl up the stairs. A bedroom door slammed up there, audible and pointed. /Young girl, interdimensional key… Either way, totally in danger from this crazed bitch-thing that could take out me and Spike like swatting flies. I need to calm her down, before she does something dumb, like climb out the window, or…/ “Nothing.” /Shit, shit./ “Sister stuff.” Or at least, that was what Dawn thought it was. She would have to play up that angle. Act like a bitchy big sister who had just been PMSing because her pill wasn’t working so great this month, or stressing over Slayer stuff that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with an invented little sister that was the literal key to the next apocalypse, or over relationship issues, or Mom, or…

/Not sister stuff like that your little sister was actually some glowy thing given to you without permission by a bunch of monks so you could protect it from some kind of nutzoid blonde monster who wanted to end the world./

Her eyes caught on Spike’s; an unspoken request that he stay with Mom. He nodded once, squeezed her shoulder, then released her to head for the couch. “Heard you’ve turned to a slugabed, Joyce…” he began, falsely jaunty. “Think it’s all a ploy, innit, and you just want a shoulder rub.”

“Oh, God, would you? You’re the best at those. I’m beginning to think that’s the main reason my daughter keeps you around…”

Any other time, Buffy would have scoffed internally at that and made some kind of heavily innuendo-laden mental commentary… but she had other fish to fry right now.

Her knock on Dawn’s door elicited the expected response. “Go away.”

/Sorry Dawn. No can do this time around./ Buffy opened the door anyway, gambling on Dawn actually wanting to talk, in her perverse, wanting-the-attention kind of way. She doubted it would be locked, and it wasn’t. 

She didn’t force her way in though, standing instead on the threshold. She also kept her arms at her sides, with an effort, though she wanted to cross them, hug herself. It was so damned bizarre to see it like this again; a normal teenager’s room, without that flickering back-and-forth from Dawn’s space to the Spike’s-plus-craft-storage-area it had been in that other, alternate reality. The might-have-been that was in any life in which she had not been graced with the task of caring for a Key made flesh. /Made mine. My ‘sister’./ 

Dawn—her supposed sister, now—sat on her bed, staring up at her with familiar, wounded-angry eyes. And, even knowing that this… being was a construct, not real, it still pulled at her heartstrings to see that expression. 

Either way, she had to mend fences, or this could all go to pot. “I’m sorry,” she began, wondering just how the hell to do this. Any of it. How to act around this… person. (Person?) How to…

“You hurt my arm.” The accusation sounded real. Petty, and valid. Buffy was the Slayer. She shouldn’t be grabbing fourteen-year-old kids and shoving them into walls—god, there was a dent there, next to the closet—and… /Dammit, she’s not a fourteen-year-old anything! She’s, like, what? Thousands of years old, or maybe a few months, or a year, or… Who even  _ knows? _ / It rankled, because she had no way to pinpoint it, had no freaking clue how long this… construct of a person had been in their lives, how long she had had a ‘sister’, how long…

But the fact of the matter remained, she had hurt this… being tonight. Someone who, to all intents and purposes, believed she was a fourteen-year-old kid, and Buffy’s sister, and… /And, damn all of this!/ “I know.” /And when I did it, I  _ meant _ to. And I’m sorry for that too. Because… Fuck. You’re an innocent in this. Possibly more so even than me and Spike. As much as Mom. As much as…/

God, this was hard.

Dawn’s eyes blazed at hers, disgruntled and oh-so-adolescent. “Butthole.”

/Oh, jeez./ She just sounded so… fourteen! It crumpled something inside Buffy that fought to hold fast to definitions like ‘otherworldly’, and ‘ancient’, and ‘metaphysical’ and ‘eldritch’. 

All Buffy could see, hear, smell, taste, feel, remember right now was, ‘dumb kid’ and ‘baby sister’, and it was  _ so _ confusing, and the words were out before she could even consider their content, as absolutely sincere as they had ever been. “Really sorry.”

Dawn just glared, and when she spoke she sounded as hurt and spiteful as only a freshman could. “I tell you I have this theory? It goes where  _ you're _ the one who's not my sister. 'Cause mom adopted you from a shoebox full of baby howler monkeys, and never told you 'cause it could hurt your delicate baby feelings.” She bit off the last couple of words with enormous adolescent rancor that reminded Buffy of precisely how everything had felt at that age, with puberty and hormones and… And god, did she ever remember. She remembered seeing everything through a haze of red for years. Snapping at everything. Snapping at Dawn over cereal at breakfast, back in LA, for chewing too loud,  _ breathing _ too loud, because she hadn’t slept well enough or long enough after cheerleading practice ran late, and she’d stayed up doodling some idiot boy’s name in a notebook and talking on the phone with… whoever, about said idiot boy, and…

And that had all been  _ before _ she had been Called. Before the enormous explosion of power and energy, before the raging, jittering need to go and do at all times, before the stress and the strain of being something otherworldly and part of that indeterminate universe where you could be good or evil, depending on how you were used by that world, and… /Oh my god./

Dawn was part of her world now. And she didn’t even know it yet.

The agony of that drove Buffy a few steps further into the room. “That’s your theory?” she choked out; trying for encouraging. /Get it all out. Go ahead and make me the villain. I can take it./

Dawn practically sniffed, turning away a little and lifting her nose. “Explains your fashion sense. And your smell.”

God. She sounded so much like a sister. So much like  _ her _ sister, that… /Dammit./ “I'm sorry, okay?” And she really meant it. All of it. /I’m sorry you were dragged into this as much as I was. I’m sorry this is your life; that you’re stuck here with me as your… sister. I’m sorry that you’re human—and not—sorry I took it out on you when I thought you were the enemy. Sorry I suspected you were out to get Mom./ She still didn’t know if the memory alterations had had any effect on their mother… but if they had, that wasn’t something she could lay at Dawn’s door. That would have been those damned monks, and it sounded like they were all dead. And anyway, thanks to Spike, they hopefully had the cancer on the run, so… /Besides, people get those tumors all the time. She could’ve just… gotten it, and the timing’s just weird. No reason to think…/

“Broken record much?” Dawn trivialized her apology, breaking into her whirling thoughts as she did. After all, why actually accept an apology? That would be way too civilized for a kid who, if she wasn’t made from interdimensional key material, was definitely the one who was raised by baby howler monkeys. 

/I mean, have you heard her  _ screech? _ / “You can't even take an apology,” Buffy heard herself snap, briefly pushed over the edge. “You always  _ do _ that. Ever since…” Hearing herself, Buffy halted with an effort. /Since… yesterday? Three months ago? Last week?/ 

Out of sheer lack of any other sensible action, she sighed and moved to sit on the bed next to her… Her sister. /Damn./ “I just had a bad day,” she put in finally, wearily. /God, you have no idea. First Mom, then… all this./ 

“Well, join the club.”

Buffy supposed by teenage definitions, this could qualify as bad. Also, compete much? “Can I be president?” /You know, since mine was objectively about ten times worse?/

Dawn finally gave in to smile just a tiny bit. “I'm president. You can be the janitor.”

Out of nowhere, Buffy actually felt herself smiling in response. It was just so…  _ Dawn _ that it actually warmed her heart. “Okay,” she agreed, and when the impulse came, she didn’t stop herself, permitted herself to reach up, stroke the… Stroke her sister’s hair.

She  _ felt _ real. She  _ was _ real.  _ ‘Human. Human now. She doesn’t… know that.’  _

“Buffy?”

Shaken from her unnerving thoughts by the quaver in her sister’s voice, Buffy slowed in her stroking to lay a hand on the young being’s shoulder. “Yeah?” she prompted.

“Is Mom gonna be okay?”

Buffy bit her lip and prayed she wasn’t lying when she answered; that none of this meant that Mom would relapse, or get worse, or that the pressure wouldn’t be too much for her human mind to handle. “Yeah. I think… she’s gonna be okay. The doctors…” Forcing herself to continue the long, slow strokes, she nodded firmly. “Yeah. We’ll all make sure she is, right?” And then, seeing an in, “We just have to go out of our way to… to take care of each other, and stay out of trouble, like we’ve been doing, and stay close and take care of her, and… You know. Pull together. Be a family. Right?”

Dawn nodded. “Yeah. It’s hard. I want to just… do dumb things sometimes,” she confessed suddenly, “because I’m stressed.” And suddenly she was speaking in a rush. “Janice said we should go with these guys she met. Sophomores. They want to…” She halted abruptly, cutting herself off.

A slow dread crept into Buffy’s heart. /Oh, crap./ “Want to what, Dawn?”

A heavy sigh. “I dunno. Get into trouble, probably. I don’t know the details. Be cool. Do Halloween stuff. Whatever…”

“Egg houses? Knock over mailboxes? Sneak in and steal stuff from defenseless old people?”

Dawn started to pull away. “Like I know! I just…”

Buffy sighed again and went on stroking. “I get it, Dawn. Wanting to impress cute guys and be cool. Not wanting the social death of saying no to stuff like that. But just remember… that kind of thing only makes you feel better for a few minutes, and then you end up paying for it for months afterward.” She bit her figurative tongue to keep from telling her sister that Janice was a bad influence. She had had her own share of bad-influence friends in LA back in the day and survived. 

She also fought not to ask who these boys were. /Probably they’re older, too. Dammit./ “But also… I did dumb crap when I was fourteen,” she allowed after a moment. “I guess… it didn’t kill me. So…” She held her breath, let it out long and slow and measured. “At least Halloween’s, like, the safest night of the year to do stupid, dumbass stuff.” /At least, that is if this bitch follows The Rules. Which, who knows if she does. So far, she’s not following any of the other rules, like being less strong than the Slayer, or anything like that./ But still, the fact of the matter remained that they were going to have to follow Dawn around from here on out, know where she was at all times, crap like that. /At least we’re starting off well, since she’s, like, confiding in me about this Halloween thing. But that doesn’t mean we’re gonna know what she’ll do next week, or the week after./

Buffy eyed her sister grimly. /Am I going to have to follow your stupid butt around all Halloween like some kind of dumb chaperon to keep you safe, when it’s supposed to be my night off? And then what will you do after that, when you’re all pissed at me for ruining your party?/

Dawn shrugged, looking suddenly tired. “I probably won’t do it anyway. Maybe I’ll just find a party or something instead.” 

/Because those can be so much safer./ But Buffy bit her tongue against saying it. They couldn’t all be possessed tiny-fear-demon parties, right?

Dawn eyed Buffy from her periphery, as if she found the silent acceptance suspicious. “I didn’t tell Janice, but… I’m kind of… scared of hanging out with guys… like that.”

Buffy exhaled suddenly, struck with such a wave of relief that it almost knocked her down. “There is nothing wrong with that.  _ Nothing _ , Dawn, okay? Seriously. Don’t let Janice or anyone talk you into doing anything you’re not ready for, alright? There’s plenty of time for boys, and…”

A step too far. “I know, okay?” Dawn swung back. “Jeez, you don’t have to get so frantic! I’m not like you, with the whole sex-fiend, swinging from the rafters…” She was blushing as she summarized what she apparently thought of Buffy’s relationship status.

/Oh, wow. Alright./ Buffy wanted to be offended, but considering the source… “Okay, look. I’m not even gonna dignify some of that with a response, since you’re making most of it up in your head…”

“Tsha,  _ right _ …”

The derision was real. And you know what? Possibly warranted, but how could Dawn even  _ know _ about some of… /God, did she sneak into the crypt sometime and find the… the toys, or see the chains, or find the…/

/Oh man, did she find the  _ handcuffs? _ /

It would be just like Dawn to go poking around, too. Oh, man. “Listen. What other people—other  _ adults _ —do or don’t do is none of your business.” Which hopefully did not count as an admission, since that would lead to this whole other road that she did not want to go down, because impossible much? She so did not feel capable of properly explaining the whys and wherefores of the whole kink thing to a sister five-and-a-half years her junior without messing it all up and giving her totally the wrong ideas about consent and communication and the rules and… And Dawn shouldn’t even know about this stuff right now, anyway.

Right now she just needed to know that… that… “What  _ is _ your business is that, when I was fourteen, I was scared to death of boys, whatever I told everyone else.” She caught Dawn’s surprised look, nodded firmly back. “Yeah. I can admit it now, whether I could then or not. I covered it up with a bunch of big talk, like I was Miss LA 1995, but I was terrified. Terrified they would ask me to do things I wasn’t ready for, terrified that I would destroy my entire high school career if I said no when they did push, terrified of what would happen if I didn’t. And that’s fine. Because that’s  _ normal _ .”

Dawn averted her eyes, staring down at her hands, the comforter on her bed. 

/Oh, damn./

She really did have a sister. And she needed to step up. Because… /If I’d had a big sister when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, then maybe…/ Oh god, the maybes. “This is a scary time. And the main thing you need to know, Dawnie, is it’s way more important in the long run that you say no, if that’s what you’re feeling—no matter what happens to you socially—than that you do something you’re not ready for…”

“Ugh. I  _ know _ , Buffy. Jeez…”

“No. You  _ don’t _ .” /Oh, God./ She needed to get this across, because she had lived it. Was  _ still _ living some of it. /You need to  _ understand _ … Some of what you’ve maybe seen, Dawn… Some of that is me freeing myself of something that happened with a guy who made me smaller than I am. And I don’t want that to ever happen to you./ “I need you to hear this, from someone who’s been there.”

Dawn’s eyes rose slowly, embarrassment fading into frank interest. “Because of…”

Buffy bit her lip, because it was an old pain now, but it was still a remnant. And that remnant would always ache. “Angel. Yeah. And believe me. There’s a… A weird pride in holding your head high and standing your ground with the dweebs who don’t go there. And you can for sure find other girls—and even guys,” she put in, thinking of clumsy, virginal Xander, “because there are plenty of those, too, who waited, whether they’re ready to admit it or not—but I  _ promise _ you…” She dragged in a deep, pained breath, held it. /Okay./ “You can never take back a bad first time. Never. It will screw you up for the rest of your life, whether it’s bad because the guy… or girl, I guess,” she interrupted herself, thinking what if Willow hadn’t started with Oz. “…Was a jerk about it. Or because you weren’t ready, or whatever…” 

She caught Dawn’s eye before her gaze could skitter away, held it firmly. “No matter what, it stays with you. It can mess up all the relationships you have later on, it can make it so you wreck good ones, mess up other people who love you… It can make you a big mess for the rest of your life, way past high school. So believe me. It’s way better to live a couple more years of social weirdness than to live who knows how many years later after school with a bunch of sexual trauma that takes, like, patient partners and a bunch of counseling, even, to get past, just because some dumb guy pressures you to get down.”

Dawn nodded at the blanket. “I mean, I get that. I know it. That’s what everyone says. But what if…” She went pale then. “I’m not a Slayer. What if I’m out with a guy and he threatens to…” Her voice went tiny. “…Hurt me if I don’t…”

Everything inside Buffy tightened up at this unfortunately very realistic scenario. “I’m famous with all their older siblings,” she bit off bleakly. “You invoke me. You tell him your big sister will  _ kill _ him if he touches you. That I will rip his penis off and make him eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and he will spend the rest of his life peeing through a straw if he touches you without your explicit,  _ enthusiastic _ consent.”

Dawn giggled involuntarily, then sobered as swiftly. “What if… I  _ think _ I really want to… and then I change my mind, realize I’m not ready, and…”

“Then you’re not.” Buffy eyed her sister frankly, let Dawn see and hear the candid note in her voice. “I’m gonna be blunt, Dawnie; you probably won’t be. Not for a lot longer than you think you are. I thought I was way ready when I turned seventeen. I wasn’t.”

That surprised her sister. “You… Seventeen?  _ Really?” _ That in the stunned tones of a teen for whom seventeen was eons distant from the current moment.

“Well… barely.” Buffy shrugged it off. “I mean, I was ready hormonally. I wasn’t ready for… the fallout. The emotions and the negotiations and the relationship changes and the… All the stuff that comes with it. You can be ready for the sex part and still not be ready for everything that comes with it. And unfortunately… all the other stuff is always part of the package. But maybe,” she allowed after a second to process, “all that stuff might be a lot different if you’re with someone who’s just as stupidly underage, and not some older guy who expects too much from you and turns into a mega jerk about it the minute the afterglow ends.”

Dawn dropped her eyes away again. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Buffy had definitely done a lot of thinking about how all that had gone since. A lot of thinking about phrases like,  _ ‘You have a lot to learn about men’ _ . As if she should have known anything. The accusation had stung badly then, but, now, in retrospect… Why  _ should _ she have known? That was the damn  _ point!  _ “To be fair, though, sometimes older is better from the standpoint of being better at… stuff, so you have more fun…” /Certain  _ other _ vampires being a case in point./ “It’s really just luck of the draw.”

Dawn sighed exuberantly and flopped her arms around, hands flailing slightly in her lap. “You know what? I resign. Why don’t you just go pick a boyfriend for me, and I’ll trust that you know which ones are the good ones?”

Startled, Buffy barked out a laugh she couldn’t quite contain. “What, because my batting average is so perfect? I hit a home run after three tries…”

Dawn’s eyes lifted to meet hers, and she smiled a little. “Some people would call that super good odds.” And she shot a glance out of her bedroom door. They could hear Spike’s voice, murmuring low from the couch downstairs, then Mom’s higher tones in answer, followed by a delighted laugh. 

“Yeah, well.” Buffy shook her head, resumed her hair-stroking. “I can’t take credit for that one. It was kind of an accident. If it was me, I probably would have done something stupid, like run the other way. I’m about as good at recognizing the right guy as I am at driving.”

Dawn nudged her shoulder lightly with her own. “But you’re getting way better at the driving thing,” she hinted. 

Buffy rolled her eyes companionably at her sister. “I’m not picking your next boyfriend for you, Dawn.

“Party-pooper.”

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
I really like cultivating a better sibling relationship between those two, earlier on. It's a thing.  
  
So, now we have Glory, in all her... well, glory.   
I know some people thought she wasn't, but I think she's just the hell of a lot of fun.  



	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now that I go back over it, this chapter is a lot of tying up loose ends, setting some things in motion for the next couple of chapters, and ruminating over some things that later become important (much later)... and thus I guess could be considered a sort of 'transition chapter'. 
> 
> Also, smut, because Spuffy decided there ought to be smut, and who am I to argue?
> 
> Love, as always, to wolf_shadoe, for being the awesomest EVAR.

Things were weirdly quiet for a while after that, which was unexpected. 

What  _ was _ expected, of course, was that the insanely strong lady-evil would come crashing into their lives on attack-mode and try to find out what they knew about her Key; or alternatively, that something awful would happen to Dawn, or Mom. None of these things occurred. In fact, insanely-strong evil-chick basically vanished. Buffy even went back to see if having a building fall on her had had any effect on her. She found the place cordoned off with police tape and all that stuff, and the monk’s body, of course, being carted off by the coroner. As luck would have it, her friendly cop-contacts, Waller and Cortez, were hanging around, and she was able to catch their attention long enough to share some 411. “Did they find anybody inside?” she asked them in a low undertone as she sidled up close.

“No,” Waller answered briskly, eyeing the building, and frowned at her. Caught sight of her bruised chin and cheek. The light of understanding kindled in her brown eyes. “Were we supposed to?”

“Not necessarily.” Buffy glanced over at the body bag on the gurney. “Did they identify monk-guy yet?”

That earned her a narrow-eyed look. “No. But there’s a guy flying in from LA; from the Czech Embassy, so I’m guessing he’s a Czech national…”

/Okay, wild./ But it told her a thing or two about the Key, aka her sister. “Awesome. Thanks.” She pulled away, made to melt back into the background.

“No, wait; hang on. I scratched your back,” Waller hissed. “What the hell went down up there?”

Buffy rolled her eyes at the cop. “Nothing you can put in an official report.”

Cortez, clearly newly-enlightened as to the state of things in Sunnydale, snorted grimly, hitched his fingers into his service belt, and stepped off a little. Glanced away, his expression turned to stone. Buffy thought she saw at least five new frown-lines around the guy’s eyes and mouth.

Waller just looked stone-faced and determined. “Ease my mind anyway.”

Le sigh. “Fine. Spike and I fought some crazy bitch stronger than five of me. She’s still at large. She had monk-dude over there tied to a chair for who knows how long and was beating him up, trying to get him to tell her something. He died before he could tell us why,” she lied, then shrugged. “The only reason we even came down here is because a couple nights ago we were tussling with a vamp by the building and a security guy saw us; then I ran into the same security guard in the hospital yesterday, acting all nutzo. I thought it was suspicious.”

Officer Waller frowned thoughtfully. “For the record, that sounds insane.”

Another sarcastic snort from Cortez; one that clearly stated that anything and everything that happened in this town was insane, no matter what went down.

“I told you you didn’t want to know.” Buffy turned to leave. 

“Hey, wait. You said this woman just beat you and your guy up and then vanished?”

“Well, the building fell on her. But since she’s not dead in there, yeah. I’m guessing she’s still out there somewhere.”

The cop looked unhappy about this little tidbit. “Great.”

Cortez, still standing off to one side, hunched his shoulders and looked hunted. Buffy started a mental countdown in her head of how long before the guy would retire or ask for a transfer to another city’s PD. He had wanted to be a cop. He probably hadn’t so much asked for the supernatural aspect. 

She didn’t think he could hack it. “The joys of working the underbelly of Sunnydale. Have a nice day, Officers.”

Waller crossed her arms uncomfortably, but didn’t back off the way her partner was doing.  _ She _ could cut it. “Uhuh, sure. C’mon, Ramon. Let’s go get some Subway. You look hungry.”

“Yeah. Like I could eat.”

So, yup. That guy was so not gonna make it. 

Crazybitch didn’t show anywhere else. Life went on apace. Halloween went off without a hitch, between their resident Master keeping the town under wraps, and his threatening his ‘Platelet’ within an inch of her life to stay away from everything that might remotely exhibit behaviors indicating they possessed a penis until she was at least eighteen. Dawn went to an age-appropriate Halloween party, watched scary movies, drank punch that might or might not have had a little bit of alcohol in it, ate a bunch of sweet food and too much candy, threw up, had a lot of fun and then none, came home, and went to bed for about twelve hours. 

Oh. And somewhere in there, they also informed Giles and the Scoobies about the incoming big badness and the fight-gone-wrong, and everyone hit the books. And found precisely nothing about a blonde female monster in a red dress who was stronger than a Master vamp and a seasoned Slayer put together. After which everyone just kind of sat around looking flummoxed for a while before going back to trying to make the Magic Box a going concern. 

“But, like… how can anything be stronger than Buffy?” Xander asked at one point, clearly stumped as he slapped closed his copy of Sunder’s Compendium.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Xander, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” Giles informed him, and turned away to reseat his own tome in the bookshelves at the top of the weird little ladder-accessed nook he’d set aside in the store for his private, not-for-sale stash.

“Yes, there are. Like, for instance, the fact that we somehow didn’t get this place open in time to take advantage of Halloween shopping. Do you have any idea how much  _ money _ we just lost? The sales we could have made with all the gimmicky ‘oogy-boo-Halloween witches’ nonsense?” Anya sounded disappointed, if not horrified by the thought. 

“I, too, am terribly let down, Anya, but what’s done is done. We must persevere despite our losses, and hold our heads high. There is, after all, a new threat to be faced on the hellmouth…”

“So, um… you guys?” Jonathan’s tentative voice broke through the sawdusty, paint-smelling quiet of research and redecoration. 

“Yes, Jonathan?” Anya prompted distantly. Alone out of the group, she was behind the newly-situated counter, determinedly organizing the register instead of skimming through the books. She had insisted that there was no such being as they had described in any of her vast experience with things demonic, then marched exasperatedly off to help Giles get ‘their magickal front’ off the ground ‘before they lost any more money’, because it was a way to ‘make herself far more useful than poking around in a bunch of inaccurate texts for information that didn’t exist’.

You had to give Anya credit. When she had an opinion, she wasn’t shy about letting everyone know about it.

Blushing, Jonathan closed his current book, something with a bunch of Sumerian or Akkadian or something stamped into the cover. “Okay, so, there’s this kid, a couple years younger than us… He’s still in high school, but he… He’s really good at summoning. His name’s Andrew Wells…” His tone indicated he thought they should recognize the name. At all their blank looks, he elaborated. “Tucker’s younger brother? You know, Tucker who did the hellhounds? Well, Andrew tried to top him after that. He summoned those flying monkeys that attacked the school play…”

Buffy searched her mind, came up with a great big blank. “Flying monkeys? Like… ‘Wizard of Oz’ style?”

“Yeah, I guess I can see how you wouldn’t remember,” Jonathan put in with a shrug. “It probably wasn’t a very big deal to you, since you were busy with all the, you know, stuff with that other Slayer, and the Mayor, and all that. But, yeah. Uh, these little monkeys, flying around trying to bite everyone in the play and in the audience, to give them, like, supernatural rabies…”

“Sorry. I got nothin’.”

Beside her, Spike was smirking. “High school on the bloody hellmouth. A wonder any of you got a bleedin’ education. Such as it is in this soddin’ country…” He lifted a cigarette to his lips, made to light up.

“Spike, I swear by every saint on the calendar, if you light one more cigarette in this establishment I will personally throw you out into the sun and watch you turn into a crisp, and the Slayer be damned. I just had the place painted.”

Lowering his hand, Spike squinted at the Watcher, disbelieving. “Like to see you try, Rupert.”

“I’ve magicks on my side. What do you have? Brute force is all, you great…”

Buffy laid a hand on her lover’s smoking arm. “Boys, boys.” Turning back to Jonathan, she lifted a brow and waited expectantly. “Why do we need to invite this kid Andrew into the group? He sounds like a troublemaker.”

“Trial basis?” Jonathan hastened to point out, and shifted anxiously in his chair. “But, I mean, look at me. I was a troublemaker, ish, and I’m kind of useful now? Anyway, better to have me here helping than causing you trouble out there conjuring stuff that adds to your workload. I figure, same with him, huh? And besides; if this… whatever she is is bad enough to be able to cause you and Spike together serious bruises and stuff, then why not add more firepower to our side? We’ve got a pretty good witches’ circle going here. Adding more mojo to it can’t hurt…”

“Another guy would make it kind of boy-heavy,” Willow complained under her breath.

Jonathan scoffed at that. “Only if you count the parts. Andrew is so gay it’s not even funny. Energetically it would be at  _ least _ adding equal energy. Not that he realizes he’s gay. He’s so not out to himself. But anyway, he doesn’t have to be in the circle, right? Just hang around to lend mojo. Trial-basis, like I said,” he went on, eyes back on Buffy’s. “Here to be useful. Anya only helps when she wants to, too, right?”

Anya chimed in from over by the counter. “He has a point.”

“He has several points,” Giles agreed, frowning thoughtfully. “Best to recruit possible future enemies to our side as allies then to let them run about free and causing extraneous mischief, one would imagine.”

Buffy honestly didn’t care what they did with their little magicks club. “Fine. Pick this kid up and check him out. I’m all for more firepower. Maybe you can get together and summon some anti-blonde-demon to fight this bitch, or something. Meanwhile, Spike and I need to find some way to keep a guard on…” She cut herself off before she said too much, caught Spike’s beetle-browed ‘shut the fuck up, Buffy’ look. “…On Mom, and I guess Dawn, in case that whole ‘they come at you through your family’ thing is still an issue…”

Giles straightened, looking alarmed. “You believe that is still a matter of concern, then?”

/Oh, you have no idea./ “I’m not going to discount it.”

Spike vibrated beside Buffy for a sec, then very suddenly hit peak escalation. “Got to step out for a bit, pet,” he told her, and headed for the door to that one mostly-empty back room. 

/Smoke-break./ There was that one shady spot by the back door there, under that one awning-thing, in the alley. Buffy had the feeling her guy would be spending a lot of time out there in the next few months, till all this was over with crazy-bitch-chick. 

“Well. I have the register organized, Giles. I have to head back to the gallery. I’d advise you to hire some of these other people on as part-time assistants as well, since they’re always here anyway, or else you’re going to be run into the ground once you open. You’re going to need all the help you can get; and anyway, I may be your manager, but you’re still going to need sales associates.” She lifted her head briskly to eye him, picked up a key from the counter, bent over to lock a drawer in the counter below the register. “Once business picks up, that is. You can’t be everywhere at once. And while I enjoy the management and bookkeeping and financial portions of business, Xander assures me that I need to work more on my people-skills before I can be an effective salesperson.” 

“You’re doing great, Ahn. Mrs. Summers says you’ve even picked up on the whole ‘have a nice day’ thing and you’re making it sound authentic.”

“I still don’t understand why I have to say it,” she complained, frowning in confusion. “I have their money. They have their purchase. What kind of day they have is irrelevant.”

“Just a long cultural tradition of raging insincerity, Sweetie. Embrace it.”   
“Well, I suppose,” she conceded, “if it’s a tradition.”

“There’s my girl.”

Shaking his head, Giles swiveled to regard the rest of their impromptu magicks circle. “Alright, then. Who else wants to work here?”

Jonathan, Willow, and Tara exchanged glances. “Uh…” Jonathan began.

“Um,” Willow echoed, “I have class, and Tara…”

“I…” Jonathan followed.

“Don’t,” Giles put in firmly. “Welcome to your place of employment as my new shop-boy. Mind you don’t sell anyone anything out of my personal library.”

“O…okay.”

“I’ll pay you six dollars an hour. You’ll get the requisite number of breaks, of course…”

“That’s… Alright. I mean, can you afford to pay above minimum wage?”

“I wouldn’t offer if I couldn’t manage. You can start this afternoon by helping to set up the palmistry and tarot corner, since that area’s finished.”

“Okay.” Jonathan looked flustered, but also oddly pleased to be gainfully employed. Standing, he walked over to the wall and grabbed up the broom leaning there, started to sweep in that way that said he really wasn’t sure what he should be doing right at that exact moment to earn his keep.

Giles turned his gaze onto the other two witches in the circle. “Should either of you ever wish to earn monies not accounted for by the college as part of your work-study, ah, financial aid…”

“Of course,” Willow put in, nodding fast and looking kind of cornered. 

“You bet, Mr. Giles,” Tara agreed. “Anyway, we can definitely help you without needing to be paid. It’d be fun just to get our hands on the inventory…”

“You’ll keep your graspy little witchy hands off the inventory unless you’re getting paid to handle it,” Anya informed them sternly, and rounded the counter to beckon to Xander in a come-hither gesture. “Alright, Xander. I’m ready. Take me back to the gallery.”

“God, I am so pwned, aren’t I?” Xander grumbled as he followed her sweeping strides toward the door.

“Yeah, you kinda are,” Jonathan called after him. “Not that I blame you.”

“Nonsense.” Anya watched Xander as he held the door for her to exit. “You’re entirely free to date, and have sex with, other people; as am I. You know you are. I’ve encouraged you to do it. The fact that you haven’t confuses me, honestly.”

Xander shot a hunted glance around the room and then sighed heavily. His mumbled words took on the tone of something that had been repeated many times. “Anya, you know that has nothing to do with it. I’d still be pwned, so why bother?” By the way he stood, he was embarrassed that everyone was witness to this conversation.

Anya eyed him for a second, then shook her head. “I don’t understand.” She headed out past him, into the setting sun. “Maybe I never will.”

“Yeah,” Xander answered, and turned to follow her out the door, shoulders hunched under their gazes. “Maybe you won’t.”

The door closed behind them. Silence descended on the room, eventually broken by Jonathan’s low whistle. “Awkwaaard.”

“I dunno,” Spike put in, returning from his jaunt out back, and carefully closed the rear door behind him. “Some blokes would love to be in his position. All perks, no commitment, free to shag whoever he wants to shag…”

Buffy rolled her eyes at him. “If it was you and me?”

He narrowed his eyes at her and grunted as if from an unexpected impact. “Well, I’d have to stand it, yeah, since it would be up to you. But I’d spend every bloody long day fantasizing about killing the other blokes, slow and painful, wouldn’t I?”

The answer surprised her. She had expected something more along the lines of a kneejerk, ‘Then I’d kill the other blokes for touching you’, not a ‘You’d be within your rights to screw other people’. “What about you?” she asked curiously, now fascinated by his apparently demonic point of view on the subject. 

His eyes burned on hers. “Why bother?” he informed her quietly, and drew closer, as if she were some kind of magnet. “No one else would compare. Would just be tormenting myself. Waste of bloody time. Better to spend my time alone thinkin’ of you than soil myself with some other useless bint.”

/Oh. God./ “You do know that you’re insane, right?” Also, note to self to investigate this strange mindset of his further at a later date. /Does this come from some leftover vamp-nest weirdness, or…/

“Oh, shoot!” Willow broke in, sounding relieved to be able to interrupt, “I forgot to remind them about Tara’s party!”

“Oh, Wil, c’mon…”

Swinging around to pin her girlfriend with a mock-glare, Willow grinned at her all predatory. “Listen. You’re not getting out of it, so just deal. I’m going to celebrate you if I have to drag you kicking and screaming back into the Bronze…”

“Oh, Goddess… Willow…”

“And everyone’s going to be there to celebrate the awesomeness that is you, right guys?”

“Absolutely,” Buffy chimed in firmly, because, A, she was just as glad as Willow for the change of subject, and, B, she had been planning for this. She would be damned if they would let this shy girl get away with blushing her way out of this shindig, much less slithering out of the situation with her skewed self-image intact. “We are one-hundred percent Team Tara on this one, so you’re gonna have to live with being celebrated within an inch of your life. You have a few days to get used to the idea, so I suggest you get started on that.”

“Okay, I’m going to go hide now.”

“I won’t let you, baby. No hiding your beautiful face.”

“Wil…” Tara was flushing like crazy now, and definitely looked like she was ready to crawl under the closest table. 

“Dawn’s really looking forward to it,” Buffy tried, perky and encouraging. “You’re like her favorite person in the world, besides Spike. Don’t let her down, okay?” Emotional blackmail had its place.

Tara’s eyes shot up to meet hers, wide and startled… and then narrowed slightly. “You’re awful,” she accused.

“I know. But is it working?” At Spike’s swift, under-the-breath titter, she shot him a quick elbow to shut him up and tilted her head a little. “Because I can keep going. All this time I’m spending with an unscrupulous demon seems to be rubbing off.”

A strange expression passed over Tara’s face. When it cleared, she smiled; a strangely bright smile that spread, and spread, till it lit up her whole face. “Yeah,” she whispered, sounding as if she had just come to some sort of weird realization. “I think it is working.”

/Okay?/ “Good.” Buffy shot Willow a confused glance. Willow returned it with a tiny shrug. 

“Alright!” Jonathan put in, stilling with his broom in hand. “Party on, then?”

“God knows we could use a little frivolity in the midst of all this madness,” Giles pointed out grimly, and hefted a small shelving unit to carry it toward the divination area.

***

“Spike, do you think what’s going on between Xander and Anya is… healthy?”

Leaning back against the brick wall beneath the back awning, Spike eyed her over his Bic, then shoved it back into his pocket and exhaled smoke over his knuckles as he lowered his newly-lit cigarette. “I think Vengeance doesn’t deserve to put all her self-worth into a relationship with a bloke as isn’t able to treat her right. And I think Harris isn’t grown up enough to do that, or to know what he wants. Though,” he went on after a short pause, “this situation might get the sod there faster than if they were exclusive.” He lowered the cigarette and looked pensive, shrugged slightly. “S’pose it makes sense that he’d be that bunged up about relationships, given what you say about his upbringing.” Sapphire eyes rose to meet hers in the overcast of the makeshift sun-cover. “So yeah. To be honest, Buffy, I think this is the best way for them to go about it. Least till he’s figured himself out enough to be worthy of her; and to give her time to decide whether she even wants him to be.”

“Oh.” A feeling of pervading sadness descended over Buffy, and she moved over to settle herself on a stack of empty crates about a foot and a half from where her guy leaned butt-first against the store’s wall. “So… when it was you and… Dru, I’m guessing, was that what it was like?”

He froze. His face twisted, and when he finally moved, it was to flick at the ember on the end of his cigarette with way more force than was strictly necessary. “Bit different in a nest, pet.”

She knew that tight voice, those held-close-to-the-vest, painful emotions. “Tell me?” she prompted gently.

He kept his eyes on the ground. “There’re healthy reasons, like theirs. Then there’s just…” He exhaled suddenly, and exasperation flooded the link between them. “Dammit, Buffy, it’s just bloody well different, yeah? Everything’s sodding top-down for vamps. Has to be, innit, or the whole bleedin’ hierarchy breaks down.” The cigarette corked his mouth for a second, and he sucked, furiously. Then his hand dropped, and he was talking again, smoke drifting from nostrils and lips, making him look kind of like a humanoid dragon. “This, what we have here? Would never be permitted. Couldn’t be, or a Master, a nest-sire… They wouldn’t be able to keep control of the vamps below ‘em.” 

He scoffed then, eyes still glued to the ground, and the bitterness in his voice pained her to hear it. “You have to have the childe lookin’ to the sire with all love, all fealty, or they just run amok… but the sire can’t look at the childe that way. Sire has to look to  _ their _ sire in the same way; all the way up to the one as runs things.” His voice had gone low, still, lost its ferocity. “It’s one-sided, and it bloody well hurts… but that’s what makes you leave, eventually, to go off and sire your own childe so that you can feel loved like that.”

/Oh. Oh, wow./

Spike’s lips twisted faintly, and he lifted his cigarette again, but didn’t set it to his mouth. “Probably the only reason we keep on as a species, yeah? Because if we felt wholly loved by our sires, we’d never need to make childer of our own to make us feel that way, and we’d all just bloody well die off.” A faint shrug. “Because if the sire loved the childe the same way as you do in a closed claim, then…”

She got it. In that instant, she got it. “Then you can command each other. You cut each other off from the hierarchy. You’re not a part of the nest anymore; and the sires, the masters, none of them have any hold over either of you, because the only loyalty left is to each other.” 

As a system, it really sucked for half of everyone involved… but for the continuation of the species, it worked. What was that _Star_ _Trek_ thing Xander was always quoting at her? The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or something? 

It was straight-up natural selection, like they’d taught her in science classes in high school. Species survival was selected for over individual happiness, every time.

“Yeah,” Spike agreed, his voice caustic with it. “And it’s why I didn’t know, love, till we did it. Why no one knows, yeah? How it works; because it’s just not fucking done.” His tones turned sardonic. “‘Cept, I suspect, maybe with some Master or other here and there, in the past. Because it’d work well enough if you’re at the top of the food chain. Wouldn’t interrupt things if you then sired someone, started your own nest.” He tilted his head thoughtfully at her. “‘Magine if I did… And don’t look all worried, Slayer. I’m not plannin’ on it. Don’t want the responsibility, do I? Spent too many soddin’ years takin’ care of my own sire to want to put up with managing a fledge.”

/Oh./ She couldn’t quite hide the relief she felt. She knew he would manage his own fledge, if he ever made one, much better than these other idiots, but the idea that she might have to stake her lover’s… child if he or she got out of hand—that she might ever have to hurt Spike that way—was anathema.

Knowing eyes glittered on hers, and she knew that was part of the reason he never would. “Would be mine to do, Buffy, if I ever did, and it went wrong. Sire minds his get. Wouldn’t be yours to do away with.”

/Ouch./ That was, if possible, even worse. To have to watch him dust his own… childe, to save her having to do it…

/Just, no./ 

Thank god he never wanted to go there.

The strain on the link between them peaked, and he looked away. “But if I  _ did _ sire someone,” he went on, lightly theoretical, “it wouldn’t fuck with our bond, because the fledge would look to  _ me _ . Wouldn’t damage my bond with you, because I look to  _ you _ , yeah? The sire doesn’t look to the fledge, so the hierarchy remains intact.” 

She could breathe. She could. It took voluntary concentration, but she managed it somehow, through the pain of knowing what… What being with her cost him. 

He didn’t seem to mind all that much, though; at least on the surface of it. Being… childless. As childless as she would always be. It was just… part of the package, for them to be together. And maybe… /Maybe it’s just what’s meant to be, for both of us. Maybe it’s too much to ask any child, anyway, to live in our world. To be dragged into the insanity that is our lives./ And besides; not that she could even think that far ahead, but the idea of trying to protect any… Any human baby…

Not that she could imagine doing… what it took to have one, with anyone not-Spike. Not to mention, babies were so… vulnerable. And they were built-in leverage against a Slayer. /And my life is so automatically insane; and look how dangerous things are for Mom and Dawn, just being part of my family. Heck, look how dangerous things are for Wil and Xan and Giles and everyone, just for being my friends! I should be glad Dad never comes around me anymore, because it keeps him safe./

The idea of introducing a child to her crazy, dangerous life—ever—sounded like the dumbest idea she could ever possibly imagine. Heck, introducing an unsuspecting, un-consenting baby vamp into the mix sounded like way too much work, so…

/Definitely not a road we need to go down. At least, not…/ 

Spike must have read her whirl of thought and emotion well enough to pick up the drift, for he gave her a faint half-smile, nodded, shrugged with what looked like pained derision. Then, unexpectedly, he cast aside his half-smoked cigarette to the stained pavement. It lay there, withered and burning alone. “Any road, I can command minions well enough, still, if they give me blood fealty. That bit isn’t bothered by this that we have between us. And no doubt it would be the same whether the minions were related by blood or no, so I suppose maybe it’s been done before.” He lifted his gaze to hers, dark with surmise. “‘S just, no one’s noised about it. And anyone who’s done it who isn’t a Master’s likely been dusted right off for fucking up the hierarchy, so it never made it into anyone’s annals.” A mirthless, toothy grin for what they both knew was the incomplete nature of said annals. “Internal vampire politics, yeah? Not something we advertise to the boys in tweed.”   
  
There was a longstanding agony in him, still, though, that begged for her touch. Shoving aside her own confusion, she moved away from her makeshift seat to lay a hand on his taut forearm. Right now, he was thinking not of a future closed off to them, but a past he had lived, very painfully, for a century, and would never be able to recapitulate, because... /Oh. He doesn’t want his own childe because he would never want to… to do that to anyone else./ 

She finally got it. “It can’t have been easy, though. To watch her… love other people, when you loved her so much…”

He looked away, avoided her eye, but she felt it nonetheless. “Way of the world, Slayer.” Pushing away from the wall, he stepped on the still-smoking cigarette, ground it out beneath his boot. “Any road, she didn’t love any of them, and I knew she loved me as well as she could manage it. It was just sex with the rest. Nothing more to it.” He jerked his chin toward the front of the store. “Vengeance doesn’t love any of the blokes she shags, either, and she loves the Boy as well as she’s able. Gives as much of herself to him as she can at mo’. It’s only, she’s been hurt badly enough she’s afraid to give more and be hurt again. Can’t trust her heart to him…” A considering tilt of the head. “…And it isn’t as if I can blame her. Harris is lucky. At least she’s not in love with some other bloke. He’s got a shot at winning her, with time an’ a bit of patience.” A tiny, one-shouldered shrug. “‘S more than I ever had.”

/Oh, wow./ “Spike…”

He lifted his eyes to her, and that one small smile broke out across his lips; the almost shy one. “Which is fine, yeah, since I got what I wanted in the end. I struck out on my own, the way I was meant to have done long since. The way she knew I would. Found someone who’d love me well. Didn’t even have to kill anyone to do it.” He glowed at her for a moment, then sobered. “Feel a bit bad for her that she gambled and lost the toss, for her part. Always will. She rolled to give me up to you in hopes of getting her Daddy back, and instead lost us both, came up empty. An’ I suppose that’s the way of the world sometimes, but I hate to think of her wanderin’ out there alone in it.” Buffy felt the tight concern in his voice, in his very being as he said it. The worry that would always be there, for the sire he had loved and cared for for a hundred and twenty years. “But it’s not my lookout anymore. She’s healthy, and she’s a big girl.”

It twisted in her. “Do you want to go… look her up? Find her, see if she’s… doing okay?”

A slight hesitation, a flicker of surprise, as if he was shocked that she would be generous enough to offer, then… “No. No, Buffy, I think…” He straightened, firmed up his stance. “No, I think it’s best I don’t. I’d like to believe that this thing between us makes me immune, but I’d rather not test it, yeah? Just in case she can still pull out a sire-command on me. Because we’re still only guessing, and I just don’t bloody well know, innit?”

/Oh./ She hadn’t  _ remotely _ thought of that… and what a thought it was. “Yeah. Ew.” Also,  _ no _ . Drusilla would pry her mate away from her over her cold, dead, lifeless body.

As if the very thought had given him the jitters, Spike went all spastic. He started glancing out under the awning, gauging the sun, eyeing her. And Buffy felt his sudden surge of need-want-yearning. The need for reconnection. “Want to get the hell out of here, love?”

As always, he could make her tingle all over with just a look. She blew out a steadying breath, nibbled on her lower lip. “You talked me into it,” she admitted, and batted her lashes at him in an attempt to lighten the mood.

He barked a short laugh and held out his left hand, tugging the duster up over his head with his right just in case a stray remaining sunbeam might catch him on the ten-foot dash to the car. “Mum’s at the gallery till eight tonight, innit?” he asked pointedly. “Doin’ the Cartright showing?”

/Ooh, you’re so bad./ “You really like to walk on the wild side, don’t you.”

He grinned challengingly and lifted his brows. “We’re gonna be right at her side all through the next showin’, when she puts up Donavan’s bloody strange stuff from our side of town. I think she owes us the indulgence of an hour…”

Buffy was still of two minds about her mother showcasing demon art, but she wasn’t going to get back into that one at this stage of the game. “You just want to live dangerously.”

“Well, yeah. But not because it turns me on.” His tones were pointed. Damn him.

Buffy refused to admit to the fact that he was right. But he was, as attested to by the pulsing taking up residence between her legs. Because, yeah, she had developed a certain  _ thing _ in the last half a year or so about the whole thrill of maybe getting caught. /Not that I’m an exhibitionist, exactly, but…/ But it was kind of a recognizable pattern. Ish.

One he had in no way missed, the jerk. “I thought,” she began as she ducked into the car, “um, you wanted to take the time and have the space one of these times to do, you know, that  _ other _ thing…”

Ducking in after her, he shot her a brief, searing look. Turned away to start the car and guide it around the building, out of the alley. “Never you worry, Slayer,” he informed her finally. “I’ve a scene in mind for that other thing. A well-developed one. It calls for a certain amount of privacy, yeah, and a lot of uninterrupted time. And I’ve a plan for that, as well.”

“Oh?” Just the thought made her all tingly. “And, um, how…”

His head was in profile as he made a wide turn to the left, but she could still see the instigating smirk on his cheek. “I’m thinking maybe we should go shopping, pet.”

That threw her. “Shopping? For wh…” The answer to her question hit her very belatedly, and right between the eyes. “Oh.  _ Oh _ .” And then… “They won’t let me in. Not for another year and change…”

The shit-eating grin widened. “That, Slayer, depends entirely on who owns the shop. You’ve cred that has nothing whatsoever to do with papered age once you cross the tracks, and you know it. So. You let me know when you think you’re ready to do a little  _ browsing _ …” His eyes turned on hers, serious and dark and sparking with bright amber highlights that  _ dared _ her. “Since you’re the one who’ll be employing what we buy.”

She shivered. And didn’t answer. Mostly because she really didn’t think she was capable of speech at all at the moment.

***

Buffy sighed and lay back, sprawling next to Spike on the rumpled, damp bed. “We have to wash the comforter again.”

“Mmm.”

“Mom’s gonna know we screwed in the house. It’s like the only reason to do that so often.” /And I can’t tell her that it’s so not my fault, ‘cause I’m screwing a vampire who’s completely inspirational; just  _ talking _ about taking me to a sex shop to pick toys to use to screw  _ him _ , so I lost it and couldn’t help it and had to drag him upstairs to fondle him a little in… places, so that he could also fondle me a lot in… places, and…/

He turned over to nuzzle right into her armpit, because he was a freak. “Tell her I made you breakfast in bed,” he suggested, muffled.

“It’s nighttime.”

“Supper in bed.”

She rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “That just sounds suspicious and like there were condiments involved.”

“Hence changing the bedclothes.” She felt him grin into her underarm.

“Get out of my armpit, you dork.” She shifted away from him, stuck her palm to his forehead, and gave him a shove. 

He grunted and sprawled back beside her, contentedly eyeing the ceiling. “Love you, Slayer. But that print needs to go. Don’t want those blokes watching me shag anymore.”

Buffy blinked up at the poster pinned over her bed. She had honestly forgotten it was even there. She had, after all, mostly redecorated her bedroom long since, bequeathing the better portion of her boyband posters to Dawn in favor of art prints from school, and things like that. She found she liked the look of the arty stuff on her walls. They made her feel more grown-up; especially when lying in the arms of her very adult lover (who was sometimes not very adult at all). But… sometimes she kind of missed feeling like the kid she had never entirely gotten to be, having given it all up. And now, knowing that maybe she might have gotten to be the baby longer if she hadn’t been made the mystical guardian of an inhuman Key-thing-turned-little-sister, she wondered if she would have redecorated so soon. /Or, did I even, really?/ If she would have had to be the grown-up one so young; if she would have…

/I should have looked a little closer at  _ my _ room before I left to go trancing around the house that night./ “I kind of want to keep just one reminder that I’m still technically under twenty,” she informed her guy softly, and smirked up at the twin Nelson brothers with their long, blond hair and turquoise electric guitars and too-pretty smiles. “At least till my birthday.” She had been way into them in, like, the eighth grade. Looking at the poster now gave her a happy, even though she hadn’t listened to that particular tape in approximately four years or something. 

“Lads are so pretty I might just look ‘em up and shag ‘em,” Spike opined, grumbling, and narrowed his eyes at the print. “Soddin’ hair bands. What the hell did the blokes sing about anyway?”

Buffy smiled and turned her face into his neck. He smelled like her, and him, and them. “Mostly love,” she informed him smugly. “Obsession, breakups, makeups… All the juicy good stuff.”

He grunted again, trying for dismissive, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Yeah? Well, that’s fairly standard fare.”

“And desire that catches you off guard and makes you do the nasty with someone you shouldn’t…” she whispered, and licked his neck. Gave him a little nip. 

That did it. He flipped over, proceeded to do some nibbling of his own while she squeaked and squirmed and tried (not really, though) to get away. “Best kind of desire, that,” he agreed, and trailed his hand down to unceremoniously plunge his fingers into her, taking her by surprise. 

“Nnn, yeah,” she answered, really not sure what she was agreeing to anymore as she arched up into his hand. “Oh, fuck, please, Spike…” Sudden, but she was ready for more, and…

“Christ, I love it when you make that sound for me, Slayer,” he whispered, and his hand was gone; and then he was crashing into her, his thumb circling her clit, his hips swiveling impossibly, and oh god, she had been wanting that, because they so hadn’t even gotten that far the first time around, and he was so  _ good!  _ _ So _ good, and…

It ended quickly as it had begun, with them panting against each other in the lowering light, the walls and ceiling and their accoutrements now hidden in the gloom. And Buffy kind of thought maybe there might be a sizable dent in the wall behind the bed. Not that that was a new thing, and hopefully Mom never came in here and inspected the house for structural damage while they were sleeping at the dorm, or they were so busted. 

“S’pose you’re gonna make me listen to these buggers, then?” Spike murmured, hand under her butt to lift her closer to him, keep himself inside of her.

She obligingly wrapped her lax legs a little tighter around him so that they could turn, sighed contentedly. “No. You wouldn’t like their music. You’d just complain the whole time and ruin it for me. You’d call ‘em poncy, or pansy, or something else with a ‘p’ in it, and whine about how they harmonize, which is like my favorite part.”

“Mmmf. Low opinion of my self-restraint, innit?”

She laughed a little into his throat. “What self-restraint?”

He didn’t dignify that with a response.

After some indeterminate period, they heard the door open and close, the sounds of rustling and voices. Mom, with Dawn, putting away their coats and chatting about how the showing had been a moderate success, and how Dawn’s evening had gone at Janice’s house. Spike sighed and drew back to caress her hair back from her face, settled the strands behind her ear. “Your legs working, pet?”

“Mmm. Definitely not.”

“Good, then.” Shifting abruptly away from her, he stripped right out of her body to roll to the side of the bed, and sat up while she was still in the middle of making shocked sounds of protest. “You stay right here, and I’ll be back in a few ticks.”

She stared after him in amazement. “Wh…” 

He was already pulling on his jeans as he leaned back to kiss her neck. She was too with the Jell-O to even catch him, though she made a grab in his direction that failed miserably before he was gone again like a zephyr. “Got to sneak out for a bit, love.”

“For what?” she demanded, now absolutely suspicious.

“Can’t tell you that, Buffy.” He grinned at her, curling his tongue in that way that assured her he was up to no good, and ran his lip into his teeth as he eyed her naked body up and down. “‘S for me to know and you to find out, yeah?”

“Okay, now I  _ know _ you’re up to something.” 

His grin broadened to a serious smirk. “Well, yeah, but it’s an official something. The old geezer knows about it; and Mum, too.”

Giles and Mom were in on something that had Spike sneaking away from bed with her to do it? What even?

Well, not much she could do about it at the moment, unless she could find a ‘get the legs to work quick’ spell. He was already downstairs making his farewells to the other two-thirds of the Summers clan and heading out the door. Punk.

She supposed she could take a shower while he was gone, or…

Well, that was the plan. In a few minutes. Smiling stupidly to herself, she trailed her fingers up along the smooth skin of the cup of her pelvis and smiled at the oversensitivity. He’d roughed her up a little in that one spot, pricked her with his fangs when he’d gotten a little excited, early on. Mmm. 

She could probably masturbate a little and think of what they had just done, or what they were planning on doing, but that sounded both a little tiring right now, and kind of like cheating, since he wasn’t there. Though, he had said more than once that it wasn’t, and had in fact sort of encouraged her to do it.  _ “Go on, then, pet,” _ he’d said once.  _ “Sort yourself out. I’ll feel you across town. It’ll drive me mad, and you know it. I’ll be standin’ about with a stiffy and nothin’ to be done about it, and have to come back later and beg you to take care of it for me…”  _ A pointed little quirk of the eyebrow that invited all sorts of games, though probably he hadn’t meant she should get him all hot and bothered while he was trying to have a conversation with her Watcher about… whatever. __

It wasn’t like she didn’t know what it felt like when he did it. They’d done it in front of each other before, obviously. But it was kind of mean, wasn’t it, to…

Something snapped a little inside her head. /You’re a jerk anyway, wandering off without telling me what you’re up to. I should… do  _ something _ to drive you nuts, since I’m going nuts wondering what you’re doing without me./ Abruptly decided, she let her hand drift south, brought the other up to her nipple… and bit her lip. “Deal with it, Spike,” she told the ceiling firmly, and set her mind to thoughts of exactly what she planned to do to him once they got done with their clandestine shopping trip.

She was just getting out of bed a little while later with the firm intent to head across the hall into the shower when he came storming back in, eyes flashing. She’d heard and felt him coming, of course, his voice clipped as he bade Mom goodnight, put up with the short conversation with her with only about one-third of his usual pleasant, loving patience. And then he was thumping up the stairs to burst into the bedroom, all glares. “You barmy bitch. You almost made me cum all over myself in my soddin’ jeans, right in front of Rupert. I had to step out back and wank off in the alley.”

/He didn’t think I’d ever actually do it. Well, guess what, ‘Honey’. I’m Buffy-unleashed, now. You’re stuck with the consequences of what you’ve wrought./ Smirking, Buffy purposely bent over in front of him to pick up the towel they’d knocked off the chair earlier in their hurry to make it to the bed. “Not my fault you left me alone to go do whatever. I wasn’t done yet.”

He was up against her in a flash and dragging her naked butt up against his jeans. He had, it must be said, a pretty impressive erection going in there. Not that that was an unusual state for him. “Jesus Christ, Buffy, if you want to get revenge on me for keepin’ secrets…”

“Then I think I won.”

He thrust once, hard against her, then let her go very abruptly, so that she stumbled. “You mad bint.”

“I’m going to take a shower,” she informed him lightly, and straightened to turn and head for the door. Wrapped the towel around herself, and knotted it firmly at her breasts. “You want to  _ come? _ ” she hinted, leaning hard on the word. 

He definitely would. Because she had stopped, on purpose, right before they could finish. Which meant that he had also had to stop. 

She would have known if he’d finished without her. She would have felt it. And in a way, it was almost like… she hadn’t given him permission yet. /And what do you know; this claimy thing comes with all kinds of special extras that weren’t in the literature when we bought stock./

Of course, it also meant that she was more than a little squirmy herself, but she’d take it. It made for a nice game of one-upmanship. 

It also made for a certain amount of leverage.

She met his eyes, let him see the challenge there. And what do you know; his hands were shaking. “Bloody fuck, Buffy,” he whispered, and his voice cracked. “Mum’s just downstairs. And if she comes up, she’ll be right on the other bloody side of the wall…”

“Then I guess you better be quiet,” Buffy heard herself answer, and pressed her thighs together involuntarily, because oh my god, it turned her on. Way too much, probably, for it to be healthy, tempting him to fuck her right under her mother’s nose. 

But it was going to happen quick for her because of that, and because she was already, ah… primed. And, well, she was pretty damned sure that it would happen quick for him too, what with one thing and the other. 

She felt his internal struggle, and… hell. He was, after all, a demon. “Sometimes I still bloody well hate you,” he flared, eyes blazing at her.

“I know,” she told him cheerily, and struck out across the hall. /Win./

He darted a look and a sniff down the hall like some kind of hunted animal, then leapt after her, helpless to resist. And the second they were inside he had her against the nearest wall. “Let go, Spike,” she ordered him calmly. “I need to lock the doors.”

He was panting. His entire body was trembling. It was fantastic. She felt heady with power as he let go of her wrists, dropped his hands to his sides and glared at her, the picture of maddened desperation. 

She walked right away from him, and watched him over her shoulder as she slowly turned the lock on the inside door that led to Mom’s bedroom.

His hands trembled, visibly, again. He shoved one into his hair, sending it into wild disarray. “Fucking hell…” he whispered.

“Lock that door,” she told him firmly.

He fumbled behind him to turn the lock in the knob with numb fingers. 

She stripped off the towel, turned to hang it over the hook next to the shower. Bent over again to start the water, while he stood dumbly by the door and stared at her like she was insane. Once she got the water to the temperature she wanted, she flipped the thing over to the shower setting, then turned around and sat on the edge of the tub. It was chilly on her butt. “Rub yourself through your jeans.”

He exhaled hard through his nose. “Oh, Christ, love…” But his hand was already moving, because she had phrased it as a command. He gave himself a hard rub, once, twice, glaring at her with eyes blazing. 

“Stop.”

He did, still glaring. 

“Come here.” 

He approached her warily, as if he were nearing some sort of unknown species of vamp-eating lioness. “What’s this sodding mood you’re in right now, Slayer?”

Shaking her head, she seized his waistband roughly and dragged him into place in front of her, thumbed the button through the eyelet of his jeans… and dragged them down without lowering the zipper. They scraped him on the way down, making him exclaim in shock. “Bloody fuck, Buffy!”

She caught his seeping cock before he even had a chance to realize what she was up to, and made it all better while his legs were still trapped together by his jeans, high up on his thighs. 

He made a high, shocked moan when her mouth settled over him, and she immediately pulled off. “Shut up,” she reminded him flatly, and returned to what she was doing. 

He made a choked noise, and dropped one shaking hand to her head. 

Gripping him just a little too hard so he couldn’t get off, she spent a little time dragging his foreskin up over the head of his cock and mercilessly tickling him underneath with just the tip of her tongue, because it always seemed to drive him completely insane when she played with it; made it swell up and get all heavy under her tongue; and flirted with that one spot just there, at the underside of the head where the skin joined up there. And because it was what he needed to get off, she came close, and came close, but didn’t touch him there, and worried at the skin with her lips, and tugged, and tickled too lightly; and felt him pulse, and pulse, and felt his needy surges rolling through the both of them, until his knees almost buckled, once, twice… and each time, she squeezed his cock a little harder… and listened to the music of him, groaning with the torture of it. 

Finally, he broke. “Fuck, Christ,  _ fuck _ ; Buffy! Oh, bloody hell;  _ please! _ Whatever I did, I’m sorry, alright? What the hell do you want from me?” It came out in an obedient whisper, but a terribly strained one. 

She pulled off again, to stare up at him. “I thought I told you to shut up.” 

He stared at her in shock.

She tilted her head, assessing for a moment, and then… Well, she was feeling pretty needy herself by now. She’d really, really like him to get her off. But probably he shouldn’t till he did it for her. “Take your clothes off. Maybe I’ll let you come if you get me off enough to make me feel better about this whole thing.” And letting him go, she stood to step into the shower, leaving him behind to stare at her in amazement. 

It made her feel incredibly slick and swollen and she really, really wanted him, and it was probably really twisted how much she liked this, but then, she already knew that. They’d played little Dom!Buffy games before this. It so wasn’t like this was a first or anything.

This was just the first time she’d ever edged him like this. Usually she was way too merciful for this kind of thing, or she didn’t have the patience. He was the one who liked to do this to her. /Not this time, though, buddy. This time I’m gonna earn that title you always give me, when you call me your queen./ 

She was in the shower, luxuriating under the hot water by the time he climbed in behind her. He just stood there, fists clenching, watching her for a second, like he couldn’t trust himself to speak. It took her a minute to realize that she’d told him to shut up about three times, and he was waiting for instructions. “You need to say anything Victorian?” she asked him softly, because it seemed like a good time to.

He eyed her for a second with a gimlet glare, then straightened slowly and relaxed his fists. Let out a long, slow breath. “No, mistress,” he whispered.

She shivered at the not-quite-controlled sound of it. “I like it better when you just say whatever comes to mind.” She drew her fingertips up between her breasts, feeling all powerful. “Come here and get on your knees. I’ve been wanting you for a really long time.” 

He did, and oh, god, the feel of his mouth on her while the hot water cascaded over her body was… Oh, fuck, it was amazing. 

Also, no one ever mentioned how tough it was to keep your balance while you did this stuff, and maybe they should get some of those assistance bar things installed in here. 

She managed well enough by putting one foot in the soap-well thing and grabbing onto the showerhead deal. And spent the next however long reminding herself very firmly not to crush the metal pipe closed each time he made her come. Which he did, three times in a row, struggling each time not to come himself when he felt her go, while she dug her nails into his shoulders, his neck, and told him very softly, over the sound of the spray pounding on his back, “No. Not yet. Not yet.” And listened to him whimper, and squirm against her clit, and moan with desperate need. 

Finally, leaning back with her head against the wall of the tiled shower, she looked down on him kneeling there in front of her all strained; smiled and nodded. “Now. Let me see you come.”

He groaned and closed his eyes. His hand dropped to his now very swollen, very brightly-colored cock. Probably all the blood he had in his entire body was there, and damn, that was pretty. It probably hurt him even to touch…

She hissed involuntarily when his hand closed around it. Yep, it did. “No. Not like that. Get up.” /You shouldn’t be on your knees anymore. You’ve done everything I asked you to do./

He rose to his feet, holding himself and watching her warily. 

“Lean back against the wall.”

He did as he was told; proudly displayed before her now with his hand resting lightly on his desperate prick. Standing there with just his shoulders against the wall, he waited then, just watching her.

“Go ahead,” she told him softly, and held her breath, ready to feel him.

His eyes fell closed when he started. Hers didn’t, and oh god, he needed this. So badly. 

It wasn’t going to take him long, either. A few quick sweeps of his thumb, a few swift jerks. She was going to have to move quickly if she was going to help. Accordingly, she let herself enjoy only a couple passes of his hand, watching him rise to the balls of his feet with each one, every muscle in his gorgeous, cut body tense with it— _ god _ , he was beautiful—before she moved forward to join him, moved her hand over the top of his. 

He jerked with a startled oath when she matched his rhythm, the shower-heated warmth of her hand a startling contrast, she knew, to his own flesh. “Buffy,” he whispered through gritted teeth. 

“What am I?” she asked him, staring into his now open eyes, and drew her hand up, gentle and with just exactly the right pressure to make him come. And flicked her thumb over that spot he loved, at the underside of his cock.

He moaned, low and guttural. “My queen,” he whispered, and spilled into her hand, a series of several full-bodied, shuddering jerks that resonated through her in a rush from loins to chest to throat. 

Spent, he sagged back against the chill tile of the shower, the black-and-white pattern startling around his flushed-as-a-vampire-ever-got body. “And don’t you ever forget it,” she told him, satisfied, and let him go.

His eyes opened once more on hers, clouded and amazed, as his own hand dropped away. “All this because I’m keeping a secret, Buffy?” he asked, quiet and curious. 

She leaned back, let the last remains of warm water slide over her hand, then her hair. “Maybe. If you want to rinse off, you better come do it. The water’s almost gone.” 

He stared at her for a beat before pushing himself off the wall to shuffle over. She sidled around to give him a turn under the spigot, watched with proprietary pride as he mechanically worked his cock to rinse himself off, splashed a little water here and there in the other nooks and crannies of him, then cursed mildly and slapped the dial off. Hm.

“Are you upset with me?”

He turned a little to eye her over his shoulder, silver necklace gleaming in the lamplight, then a faint smile quirked the corner of his lips. “Bloody hell no,” he answered, and shoved the curtain aside to nab the towel off the hook. “That was bleedin’ fabulous, you mad, torturous witch. It’s just…” He shook his head, buried his face briefly in the terrycloth, shoved it over his hair. When he emerged, he blinked at her in mild confusion. “Didn’t expect it, is all.”

Buffy seized the towel from his grasp and set about carefully drying his body, taking special care to lovingly attend to every part of him. She dropped kisses as she went; at the center of his chest, at his belly, on the tip of his cock—he made a little sound at that and jumped slightly, as did the gentleman down under, who rose to the occasion yet again, because he was always happy for any attention—fondled his excellent butt, ran the towel up and down his legs, back and front, patted off his back while he lifted his arms for her, eyeing her the entire time as if she were a museum specimen. “What?”

He shook his head a little. “Nothin’. You know. Just… still not used to this.”

/Oh./ She knew. He’d told her, earlier in the year. Drusilla hadn’t been much for aftercare. Not that she had really ever been the one to top him, mostly. He had told Buffy straight up that he was starving for that kind of loving, since he’d had to play a role he didn’t necessarily prefer with his ex, most of the time. But once in a very great while, she’d done it… and then only because she was pissed off at him. Not really a sex thing so much as a torture thing, though he’d gotten off on it because it was the closest thing he’d had in all those years to what he’d needed. But usually, because Dru had been mad at him when it had happened, or because she’d simply gotten bored, or lost track of what was going on, she would wander off and forget that he was chained up or whatever, and left him there to his own devices for sometimes days at a stretch. And he’d taken it; taken what he could get, just to have this. To have the semblance of being topped once in a blue moon, because while Spike would and could switch when he was angry, or wanted to have some fun… he mostly really, really loved having a woman push him to his knees and show him who he belonged to. 

But he had paid for it, with his sire. Sometimes really, really painfully. And there had never been anything like aftercare. 

Consequently, the first time they’d done anything like this, several months ago, and Buffy had cuddled him afterward and kissed him all better, he’d stared at her as if she were a new and heretofore unknown species of angel or something. 

He’d had no idea what to make of it. 

He’d run away, actually. Which had, admittedly, totally freaked Buffy out, wondering if she’d done something wrong. It hadn’t  _ felt _ wrong, being as it was exactly what he’d done with her after he’d played with her that way. Why would he…

Except, he’d come back a little later, after maybe ten minutes spent smoking and pacing to get his head on straight, and sat next to her, and taken her hand, and explained it. All of it, if without naming names. Explained Drusilla and him, and Angelus and him, and that everything, with him, had always been a lot of pain with the pleasure… but never any loving, after. 

And it had absolutely and completely broken her heart to hear it. 

So she always gave it to him. But she was always prepared for him to freeze up when she offered it. Or maybe for him to flee, sometimes. And she tried to do it in slow, small doses, so that it could sneak up on him, because to lave him with too much bounty in that department, the way he did with her after, would surely scare him off completely, no matter how very much he wanted it. 

/Maybe someday you’ll let me give you everything you deserve, without sarcasm or fear that I’ll… step on you./

She really, really hoped he would. That the perfect moment would come for him after they did the thing they were planning for him. Because that scene might end up bringing up a lot of stuff for him—old stuff, and recent stuff—and after that, she kind of really wanted to pamper him, if he could let her. “C’mon,” she told him softly, now, and lightly slapped his rear to get him moving. “Let’s go back to bed. We have to, you know, strip it down and stuff.” She smiled at him. “And then once we do that, I want to lay you out on it and touch you all over till you relax.”

He shivered visibly. “Buffy…”

The thing was to combine half-rough cajolery with tenderness till he broke and let himself be completely vulnerable with her. Because he had started out absolutely without any shields or guards with her, not one mask, as raw as he had ever been, and they both knew it. She had not kicked him when he was down; not then, and she never would. He just had to force himself to remember that, every time. “C’mon.”

He exhaled, sharply, nodded. “Yeah.”

She went to unlock the inside door, while he wrapped his towel around his waist and stood listening at the hall one. She toweled off quickly and wrapped hers around her hair, ready to make a naked dash across the hall the minute he told her the coast was clear. “Alright,” he whispered.

“You better be right about this,” she warned.

“I know it,” he hissed back, “or Mum’ll disown me.”

“Oh, I think at this point you’re golden no matter what we do…” 

“Shut it, Slayer, and c’mon, before one of ‘em comes upstairs…” Yanking the door open, he made a dash for the bedroom.

Giggling under her breath, she followed him at a run.

“It’s not like she doesn’t know we’re screwing,” she went on as soon as she gained the bedroom.

He shoved the door shut behind her and glared, dragging a hand through his hair again. It sprang wetly up into a riot of confused, unruly curls, all damp and spritzed-looking and adorable, and she couldn’t help it. She stripped his towel off and gave him a shove, toppling him backward onto the bed. 

“Oof. Bloody fuck, love; I thought we were gonna change the…”

“I’m going to kiss you all over, and you’re going to stand it. Because you’re so damn cute…”

He narrowed his eyes at her, flailing his hands to try to fight her off as she lunged to kiss his nipples. “I’m not… Sodding fuck, Slayer… Cute! Dammit, Buffy, quit… Aaah!” 

Jamming a knee hard up against his butt, just behind his very vulnerable balls, Buffy slapped a palm down to the center of his chest to pin him flat. “Yes, you are. Now hold still and let me make you feel loved, or I’m gonna get pissed off at you again.”

Subsiding back onto the bed, Spike rolled his eyes. “Fine. Mad scold of a woman.”

“Uhuh. Lay still and let me love you.”

He closed his eyes and sighed. “Buffy?” he whispered as she kissed around his collarbones. 

“Mmm?” 

“How the bloody hell did I get so lucky?”

She lifted her head and shoved a damp lock of hair away to eye him with what she hoped was a bright, encouraging smile. “Same way I did. Tied you up in a bathtub and made you beg for mercy.”

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Remind me to watch out around you and bathrooms… nnnn… Christ, pet… are you  _ tickling _ me?”

“That depends. Are you ticklish?” Which wasn’t a fair question, since she knew he was, at least right there. 

She kind of thought it would be fun to find more places, though.

“Oh, fuck,” he whispered. It was the voice of a man who knew he was in for a long night.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Alright, so... real talk. I had that poster over my bed as a young creature of about Buffy's age in approx. the same era.   
  
The Nelson twins were freakin' cute. And that album ("After The Rain") was catchy as hell. Anyone who says it wasn't can fight me. I still get those damn songs stuck in my head to this day, and it's been like twenty-some-odd years.   



	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I only have a few words for this one, and they are as follows.   
> Tara is, in a perfect world, my wife. She is phenomenal, admirable, amazing, wonderful, and in all ways deserving of every superlative, she was too damn good for this world, to be offered nothing but full worship... and anyone who says even one unkind thing about her will be shot on sight. 
> 
> Ahem. Now that that's done...  
> "Family", the other version. In which many, many people will deserve to be shot on sight, and may in fact achieve any number of just desserts, off screen.  
> (Obviously I've remixed episode dialogue here, but that goes without saying.)

“So, what are you getting her?”

“I dunno. You know, I feel like she already has all the witchy things she needs, huh? Not that I know one witchy thing from another…”

“Yeah…” Buffy fingered a crystal ball thing as she watched Giles pace around the store in his absolutely bonkers-looking, maroon fake-wizard robes, encouraging customers to buy stuff from his grand opening sale. /She probably already has one of these./

“I already got her something,” Dawn put in, a note of cheerful superiority in her tone. “Because I’m cool like that.”

“What did you get?” Buffy asked, desperate for inspiration; or failing that, to at least avoid getting Tara the exact same thing as someone else already bought her. 

“Nunya. Oh, and don’t buy her that. Giles got her a crystal ball already. Which is just  _ so _ lame. I bet she already has about nine of ‘em. That’s, like, the first thing any witch ever buys. Or, well, not the  _ first _ . The first is a pentacle, and then a blank Book of Shadows, and an athame, and a pendulum, and…”

Dawn, Buffy decided, had been hanging around those girls way too much. She was practically turning into some kind of apprentice witch-girl.

Xander sighed and turned away to page through a book on divination. “Okay, so she already has all the tools she needs. But what else is there? I mean, there are, what? Seven different books here on how to read tea leaves. Which, how do you even  _ get _ a tea leaf? The tea stuff is all ground up, isn’t it?”

Buffy blinked at him in amazement. “You’ve spent since sophomore year around an honest to God English guy, and you don’t know about real tea? Where have you  _ been _ , Xander? They don’t do tea bags over there.”

He seemed floored by this revelation. “They don’t?”

Buffy gaped at him. /What even?/ “No! It’s like…” She fumbled for words, couldn’t find any.

Luckily, Dawn was there to come to the rescue. “Spike says tea bags are like drinking tea out of a wet paper diaper.”

Xander’s face creased in disgust. “Okay, ugh.” His sneer vanished almost immediately, turning back to confusion. “But, if you didn’t have the bag thing, wouldn’t you just get gritty tea stuff in your mouth?”

Dawn threw up her hands and walked away, clearly exasperated on behalf of her favorite ever Brit vampire. Not that Buffy blamed her. /Oh my God, Xan, you’re like the most unobservant guy in the whole entire universe! I mean, I know I’m sleeping with an English dude and you’re not, but you still had to have at least seen them  _ drinking _ the stuff, right?/ “You don’t drink the bottom part! That’s the whole point! That’s why there’s leftover stuff at the bottom to read…”

Xander promptly turned into self-satisfied guy. “Well, then, I don’t get how anyone would ever sell a book like this in this country, since probably no one drinks tea like that here. Everyone here uses the bags, right? Because it makes more sense and it’s easier, and you don’t have to leave half your tea at the bottom of the cup. I mean, not that people from here actually really  _ drink _ tea, right? I mean, unless they’re out of coffee…” 

Buffy stared at him for a long moment, literally incapable of forming words. Sometimes she just couldn’t with Xander. 

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m going to go look at the books on trees.”

“What did I say?” 

A tinkling sound echoed from the direction into which Dawn had vanished. “It’s fine!” Dawn called. “I didn’t break it!”

“Oh, jeez,” Buffy muttered, and hot-footed it over to slap her sister’s hands off of whatever it was she was not-breaking. “You break it you buy it, dammit, Dawn!”

“I know! I’m sorry! It’s just, lots of really cool magical junk…”

“Our new motto…” Giles muttered as he paced toward the door, adjusting his goofy, tall hat with the dopey silver stars.

The bell rang over the door. “Ooh! Real, live customers!” he enthused.

It was pandemonium for a while at the Magic Box as sales picked up. Giles went from giddy, as things began at a staid trickle, to panicked when it turned into a veritable flood. By the middle of the day, everybody ended up pitching in. Buffy and Willow even learned to gift-wrap on the fly. Ish. Eventually, though, the deluge from the buying public died down to a slow ooze, and everybody except for Anya threw themselves down onto the nearest surface to put up their feet and try to pretend they weren’t exhausted to death. 

Anya, of course, was still up at the register, happily counting money. “You're out of crystal balls. Those babies are really popular with the amateurs. Better re-stock and raise the price ten percent.” She paused a moment in thought. “Make it fifteen.”

Giles groaned inarticulately.

“The cash register looks like squirrels nested in it.” She pulled a few receipts through her fingers, looking incredibly pleased to be sorting said squirrels’ nest. 

“Anya…”

“And the Hand of Glory packs some serious raw power. Better institute a seven-day background check for…”

“Anya, would you like a raise?”

Anya’s head rose, and her gaze went from happy to incisive. “How much?”

Giles waved a hand vaguely in the air over his head. “Whatever you consider reasonable, as long as you could maybe wait to talk shop till tomorrow. I am utterly exhausted.”

Anya’s expression went from businesslike to cautiously pleased. A happy little smile creased her face, and if possible, she got even more peppy than she was before as she went on sorting through the register. But she did fall silent.

Giles exhaled through his nose in relief and sagged back into his chair. 

“Giles, are you trying to steal Mom’s manager out from under her?” Buffy asked suspiciously.

“Oh, don’t be silly, Buffy,” Anya called, and slammed the register closed with a noise that sounded very much like mechanical satisfaction. “I can easily split my time between both stores. I am a very valuable employee, and it feels exceptionally good to have my skills noted and appreciated in more than one venue.”

Buffy could imagine that it did.

“God, and we still have to get together enough energy for the party tonight,” Xander groaned, hands falling from his lap to dangle from his shoulders.

Buffy groaned. She’d somehow forgotten, in the midst of all the salesmanship and general grand-opening revelry, that they had an evening engagement. /Oof. I have to get up out of this chair, go home or to the dorm, change into… something, go back to the Bronze…/ 

/Maybe I’ll let Spike carry me./ A faintly encouraging thought crossed her mind. /Maybe I’ll let Spike  _ dress _ me./ He would consider that a reward. It would save her the energy of choosing clothes, and  _ moving _ . Win all round. 

Thank god she had eventually chosen a gift for Tara before everything went completely insane.

“You promised, Xander!” Willow exclaimed, head lifting slightly to glare at him.    


“I know, Wil, I know. And we’ll go. We’ll all go. We’ll be half-dead, but we’ll go…”

“You’ll be all alive, if I have to do a reinvigorating spell on every one of you!”

“Easy for you to say. Your birthday girl isn’t here suffering with the rest of us at this incredibly ill-timed sales extravaganza…”

“It’s her  _ birthday _ . She should get a day off…”

Buffy forced her head up level with her shoulders. “She should. It’s fine. We’ll make it happen.” 

“Good. Because she’s already acting weird as it is…” Willow looked troubled out of nowhere.

The bell rang over the door to interrupt whatever Wil was about to say. Jonathan burst through to come panting into the room, looking harried. 

“Would someone please rip that bloody bell off its hinges?” Giles asked without lifting his head in the slightest.

“Would that involve moving?” Xander asked tiredly.

“I think I liked it better when demons would just crash in here and tear the place apart.” Giles sounded more exhausted than Buffy had ever heard him. Not that she felt any more spry, honestly. A full night’s slayage took less energy than dealing with customers in retail. “Just seemed so much simpler.”

It took until that moment for them all to realize that Jonathan was literally gasping for breath like he had run all the way there, and that he actually looked all wide-eyed and terrified. Not pleasant. Xander lifted his head a little to blink at the freaked-looking sorcerer. “What’s up, little man?”

The bell jangled again, while Jonathan was still struggling to get his breath. His young, blond friend, Andrew or whatever his name was, came bursting in behind him to bend over, hands planted on his knees to watch them all through the uneasy corners of his eyes. 

“Demons,” Jonathan panted, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Right… behind…”

“Lei-ach… demons,” Andrew put in, gasping. “Real… bad…”

There came a crash from the back of the shop, and Spike came bursting in from the back room. “Slayer! Place is surrounded by soddin’ Lei-ach demons. Nasty buggers. You need to get your fight on.”

Giles groaned. “I take it back. Didn’t mean it at all.”

Buffy made a face and forced herself to her feet. “Never a dull moment,” she opined as the first offender burst in. 

They were ugly bastards too. She had never seen this kind before. Gray skin, all broken by nasty, red, bloody-looking sores. They had dark, sunken eyes, and weird, thick, black tongues, which, even better, were forked. Also, twitchy noses. And they walked funny; all uppy-downy and head-boppy, like a wild animal. 

They also hissed a lot. 

Generally, just the kind of demon that mostly acted like something brainless and fight-y. Joy. “Hey. I don’t suppose you guys would rather, you know, settle this over a couple of drinks, or a game of Parcheesi or something?”

“Not the peaceable sort, Slayer,” Spike informed her tensely, and closed with one to let fly with a punch, without preamble. 

Well. Pleasantries concluded. She would roll with his assessment; especially considering that Anya had just prudently ducked behind the counter. “Dawn! Get back there with Anya!” 

Dawn scrambled to do as she was bidden, looking afraid and more than a little disgusted by the appearance of their uninvited guests. 

The fight was on after that; a nice brisk one. Spike and Buffy ended up back-to-back for a lot of it; especially after Xander got knocked silly by one of the five interlopers, Willow was upset mid-spell and didn’t get to finish cursing the two she was working on. Jonathan also tried to do a spell and got clocked across the face before he could finish… and then, at the worst possible time, three rando humans came marching into the store to offer themselves up as cannon fodder, because they couldn’t read the ‘Closed’ sign on the door?

Then Tara came busting in behind them, yelled, “Dad! Get out of the way! Donny!” And ran around behind the three remaining demons clustered around Buffy and Spike to clasp hands with Willow. 

The second their palms joined, the trio of demons screeched loudly, hands to their heads and forked tongues flapping, and collapsed to the ground. 

Spike chuckled at this, and kicked one of the now-somnolent demons lightly with a booted foot. “Handy one, Glinda, Red. Cheers.”

“Yeah. Thanks,” Buffy agreed, straightening.

Willow, though, was on a whole other track.  _ “Dad?” _ she asked shakily, eyes on Tara.

“Y…yeah. Um… M…my family… came here yesterday. For m…my birthday. But I av… They… kept m…missing me. D…Donny says they, um, looked f…for me here after they c…couldn’t find me at the dorm, b…but…”

“But the store wasn’t open yet. Oh!” Willow turned to blink at the man with the sour, disapproving expression, the pissy-looking guy with the beard, and the blonde girl with the ponytail. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Maclay, and, uh… Donny? And, um…”

“M…my cousin, Beth.”

“Hi, Beth.”

The ‘pretend everything is normal’ game wasn’t working with the out-of-towners. Beth looked like she was going to be sick as she stared around her at the gross, sore-covered demons laid out around them on the floor. Blond-beard-boy looked confused and uncertain where to step. And Mr. Maclay just looked flat-out disgusted. “What in God's name  _ is _ that?”

“Lei-ach demon,” Spike supplied easily, because he didn’t like pandering to human yokels, or pretending something wasn’t real when it clearly was. “Fun little buggers. Big with the marrow-sucking.” 

/Okay, ew./ Buffy could see how a marrow-sucking species would be tough to convince with the whole white flag game.

“Those are…  _ demons?” _ the girl, Beth, answered in a shaky voice. “Ugh! Tara! And you haven’t come  _ home _ yet?”

“She knows better than to stay.” Mr. Maclay sounded incredibly disappointed, more than he sounded disturbed by the sight of real-live demons. And, man, his face was pinched. Like he had permanently swallowed something distasteful. Which, Buffy supposed, was fair when you’d just seen your first demons, but still. 

Then, out of nowhere, he whirled on Tara. “See? This is what happens! I  _ warned _ you, young lady! We all warned you what would happen! And here you are, hanging around this… This…”

Um, wow. So not the standard reaction Buffy had expected from a guy who’d seen a demon attack. Why was he verbally harassing Tara about it, like he knew they existed and he thought being here was a bad influence or something?

Did he know about the hellmouth?

Donny broke in when his father sputtered into silence. “Of course there’re gonna be demons. Look at all these magic books. Bet they all got spells in ‘em. Turn people into frogs, things like that…”

/Okay, what?/

Xander blinked as he shoved himself to his feet. “Uh, yeah. Sure. We’re building a race of frog people. It’s a good time.” He blinked over at Tara, a little cross-eyed, but mostly confused. “Is this guy for real, Tara?”

Tara opened her mouth, but nothing came out. And that was when Buffy saw it. The body language. 

Tara had gotten smaller. Way too small. The second her father spoke up, she had shrunk. And now, with her brother joining in with all this derision…

“I bet you’re all, uh, witches, huh?” Donny put in. “Doin’ spells. Callin’ up demons.” He sneered around them, at the unconscious and dead demons at their feet. The expression made the uncertainty on his face fade out under cover of scorn. “So many  _ friends _ , Tara.” He put a weird spin on the word ‘friend’. “More people than you met in high school.”

Okay, Buffy was really not liking Tara’s family. 

Dawn crawled out from behind the counter to join Buffy and Spike, looking suspiciously from one to the other of them. She clearly agreed. “Why did you people come here?” she demanded, belligerent on her favorite witch’s behalf, and doubled her spindly fists.

The girl, Beth, spoke up again. The way she talked, it sounded like she wasn’t used to speaking up much. Her face and voice were uneasy, her eyes flickering everywhere, but the distaste she seemed to be feeling overruled it all. “It’s Tara’s birthday. We’re her  _ family _ . Of  _ course _ we came. We had to…” She trailed off suddenly, her gaze dragging across Tara’s face as if what she saw disgusted her. “We had to come,” she finished, and shuddered. “Before it was too late.”

Anya rose from behind the counter to ask the question before Buffy could. “Too late for what, exactly?”

Clearly Buffy wasn’t the only one who smelled a rat, here. For one thing, these people weren’t just acting weird because they’d seen their first demons. For another, they were jumping all over Tara almost like they thought the demon attack was all her fault or something.

They were total freaks. And the way Tara was acting, all shrinking in on herself?

Buffy had a terrible, hollow feeling in her stomach, watching Willow’s girlfriend. That recognition-y one that said maybe these people had abused her.

“She  _ knows _ ,” Beth bit off, glaring everywhere; the walls, the windows, but not at any one person. She crossed her arms, and her eyes finally locked on Tara. “She knows why. And if she knew what was good for her, and her father, and her brother, and all of you, she’d get right in that camper outside and come home where she  _ belongs _ , before anything like his happens again.”

A titanic struggle seemed to build in Tara. Her head jerked up. “Y…you’re  _ wrong!” _ she burst out. “They didn’t c…come because of me! This k…kind of thing just h… _ happens _ around here! J…just ask any of them…”

“You keep telling yourself that, young lady,” her Dad broke in, bitter and patronizing. “Now, I want you to get in that camper right now and come home. I’ve been lenient with you. I’ve let you stay away long enough. But it’s time, and you know it. You’ve fallen so far, here, around these…  _ people _ .” His face pinched up even further, if that was even possible. “You don't even try to  _ hide _ it anymore. I'd hoped maybe you'd gotten over the whole witchcraft thing. That if we let you go, you'd get it out of your system, but look at you. Hanging around in this…  _ place _ …” 

/What the hell is wrong with this guy?/ “Look, Mr. Maclay…” Buffy began.

The nasty man flung a hand up, cutting Buffy off. “Tara? What have you got to say for yourself?”

Tara shrunk down further, buffeted and berated. “I d…didn’t know that y…you w…would f…find me.”

/ _ Find _ her? God, has she been  _ hiding _ from her family?/

“We had to hunt you  _ down _ , young lady! We haven't heard from you in  _ months _ . You know what happens tonight! It’s your  _ birthday!” _

/Huh?/

“Baby… What…” Willow sounded as distressed as Buffy felt. 

Tara wouldn’t look at her. 

Beth broke in then. “I don’t believe you! Look at you! You're down here living  _ God _ knows what kind of lifestyle…”

Willow flinched and stared at the girl, nonplussed. 

/Okay, really, wow. Abusive and homophobic. Nice./ 

Tara didn’t flinch though, just stared bleakly back at her, looking like she was going to throw up or something. 

“I think you people need to leave.” The words were out of Buffy’s mouth before she could even consider them. 

Beth glared at her with eyes like ice. “I don’t think it’s any of  _ your _ business, whoever you are.” Her eyes darted back to Tara’s, accusing and hateful. “Your dad's been worried sick about you every day since you've been gone! Now, don’t you think it’s about time you came  _ home?” _

Tara looked down at the floor between her feet, sucked in a hard breath, like she was sucking in courage, and bore down hard on Willow’s arm. “B…Beth, I'm n…not c…coming back with you.”

Beth gaped at her. 

_ “What?” _ Donny roared.

Tara flinched, then, as if her brother had slapped her. 

She flinched even harder when Beth’s eyes narrowed to flinty things. “You selfish bitch!”

/Oookaaay, that’s just about enough from these pricks./ Buffy opened her mouth again, but was forestalled when Willow stepped in front of Tara. “O-kay! That’s enough! I don’t know what your people’s problem is, but…”

Beth rode right over her as if she didn’t exist. “You don't care the slightest bitty bit about your family, do you? There's a house that needs taking care of... Donny and your dad having to do for themselves, while…”

Anya jumped in then, sounding blandly annoyed. “Donny and Daddy look like a couple of perfectly capable, hardy and healthy bucks to me. No doubt they can boil water and fold laundry without assistance.”

/Seriously! What even  _ is _ this? Time-travel from the sixteen-hundreds? A cult?/ Where did Tara even  _ come _ from; a hole in the ground? 

God, no wonder she never wanted to go back!

Donny and Daddy looked seriously offended at the suggestion that they do their own laundry. Beth, as well. “You  _ know _ your little friends are gonna throw you out when they find out the truth about you,” she hissed vindictively, “and then you’ll have to come crawling back home. So you might as well come now. Save yourself the grief.”

/The  _ grief? Really? _ / “I  _ really _ think you all better leave,” Buffy spoke up, flat and certain. 

“We’re not goin’ anywhere without Tara,” Donny insisted belligerently. “She knows what’s good for her, and that’s leavin’ with us before she…” He hesitated. “Before  _ it _ happens.” 

/Okay, before  _ what _ happens?/ They kept hinting at some weird thing happening to Tara, but so far nothing seemed to be going down. What, was she supposed to get a mega witch-boost or something? Sprout horns and a tail? What?

“I d…don’t think that it… I don’t f…feel any d…different…”

“You're turning twenty,” her father interrupted grimly. He sounded disgusting as he stalked toward her. “It’s the same age your mother was when she...”

That was it. Buffy wasn’t  _ even _ going to put up with this kind of physical threat to one of her friends. She stepped between the nasty man and Tara, caught his arm, with the accusing, pointy finger. “Hold it right there, Mister. I think Tara’s made it pretty clear that she doesn’t want to go anywhere with any of you.”

The dirty old man just looked at her for a moment through hate-filled, beady eyes, then shook her off and darted them back to Tara, accusing and insistent. “Do your friends even know? They wouldn’t be protecting you, if they knew.”

Tara opened her mouth and shut it again, gone a sickly green color. She looked ready to melt into the floor.

“You can't control what's going to happen,” the old man berated on. “You have evil inside of you, and it  _ will _ come out. And letting yourself work all this…  _ magic _ is only going to make it worse. Where do you think that power comes from?”

/Okay, what?/

Tara was mumbling, now. “It... it doesn't feel evil... sir.”

Willow had had enough as well. “It doesn’t come from evil, you idiot! Tara’s magicks come from the Earth! You obviously don’t know  _ anything _ …”

“Shut. Up. Demon-witch!” Mr. Maclay exclaimed, pointing this time at Willow. “Leading my daughter down a path of iniquity with your disgusting, foul, witchy ways and your unnatural blandishments, and your…”

“Oookay, there, creepster,” Xander jumped in. “Can we tone down the snake-swallower talk?”

“Evil never feels evil!” the creepy bastard snapped. “That is how it captures you and leads you astray! All too soon these people will see your true face, Tara, and they will cast you out if you do not come with us now; with the people who will never put you out. The people who  _ must _ keep you, because family are the ones who must take you in, when no one else will.” 

/Okay, nice./ This guy needed, like, a kneecapping.

Over to one side, Spike had set up a low, insistent growl that had her arm-hairs dancing on edge. She was honestly kind of with him on the violent urges thing. Especially since… Oh, man. Tara was on her knees now, bowed over with Willow kneeling next to her, alarmed and confused. 

Buffy, standing between them and the nasty father guy, felt a whirling bemusement of her own, like she had just stepped into some very weird movie. “When did the extras from ‘The Children of the Corn’ show up in Sunnydale, though?” she heard herself demand, beyond thrown.

“Baby, c’mon. You’re not going anywhere. I don’t know what that bastard’s talking about, but…”

“They’re right,” Tara half-sobbed. “I can’t let you see… what I am…”

“Wh…” 

_ “Demon,” _ the old bastard spat. “The women in our family...”

Buffy blinked, staring at him. He had everyone’s attention now as he went on, all disgust, all condemnation, focused on his collapsed daughter as he muttered his insane denunciation. “They all have  _ demon _ in them. Her mother had it. That's where the magic comes from.”

Willow shook her head at this, staring up at the old creep. “That makes literally zero sense.”

“Honestly, very little,” Giles agreed, tugging off his glasses to polish them.

“Yeah,” Jonathan put in, piping up for the first time. “Like, uh, if you’re part-demon, you’d be able to do one or two species-specific things, but it wouldn’t, you know, give you a broad set of magickal powers. That’s not in the cards.”

Mr. Maclay glared at all of them, cutting them off. “None of you know what you’re talking about.  _ We _ do. She’s our  _ family _ . We came to take her home before...” He heaved a resigned sigh. “Well, before things like...” He pointed to the dead demons at their feet.  _ “This _ started happening.”

Tara’s head jerked up. “But I didn’t  _ do _ that! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! Demons are all over the place around here, and…” She cowered when her father shot her a quelling glare.

Alright, enough was enough. Buffy shot a glance at Xander, Giles, Anya, Willow; one to an oddly-silent Spike at her back. “She’s right. This is a regular Tuesday night around here. It’s been like this since before she came, and it’ll be like this long after she leaves. Which she’s not doing today…”

_ “Excuse _ me?” Beth interrupted. “What gives you the right to…”

“…Because  _ no one’s _ making her go as long as she says she doesn’t want to.”

“This is not your concern!” Nasty-dad flung at them. “She belongs with us. We know how to control her...  _ problem _ .”

“Her problem of being… let me get this straight. Part-demon?” Buffy asked, now almost darkly amused.

“Yes.” His grody glare was back to drilling in on his daughter. “She’s going to do what’s right, aren’t you, Tara. Now, I'm taking you out of here before somebody  _ does _ get killed.” A flicker back to Buffy. “The girl belongs with her family. I hope that's clear to the rest of you.”

Buffy turned to Tara, Willow still clinging to her hand. “Tara, do you want to go with these people?” Not that she didn’t already know the answer, but spoken consent was a necessary thing. It had power, both for Tara’s sake and for everyone’s clarity. /Please say no, Tara. Say it loud, say it proud. Say it for yourself, and stand up./

Tara shook her head and looked at the ground, obviously terrified to say no, but clearly far more terrified to go with these gross jerks. She bore down on Willow’s hand as if holding onto it would save her life.

It would have to do. Buffy turned back to the man who had, sadly, raised their friend. “It is. Clear to us.” She heard Tara’s wounded gasp, ignored it for a second. “You see, Mr. Maclay, I’m pretty sure Tara’s not part-demon. I’d sense it. But it wouldn’t matter if she was. She’d still be our friend. After all; I’m part-demon, and we all seem fine with me. I’m the leader. And Spike here—my boyfriend?—he’s a demon. And Anya there, behind the counter? She was a demon for over a thousand years. So, you know… we’re a tough audience to shake when it comes to that kind of thing.”

“You’re lying,” Beth exclaimed, sounding disgusted. “Demons are creepy, scabby… things, like this.” And she backed a little away from one of the nearest Lei-ach.

“You can never predict when a demon will come over someone,” Nasty-dad agreed, distaste written all over his pinched features. 

/Okay, wow for the uneducated among us./ Buffy crossed her arms. She was so over this. “You want her, Mr. Maclay? You can go ahead and take her.” Cue the pained gasp from Tara, the shocked stare from Will, and satisfied looks from Mr. Yuck and his son and stick-up-her-ass girl. All of which vanished when Buffy dropped her arms to her hips. “You just gotta go through me.

“Oh,” Tara whispered behind her, sounding incredulous.

“What?” Donny demanded, clearly flabbergasted.

“You heard me. You wanna take Tara out of here against her will? You gotta come through me.” /And I will personally fuck you up, hardcore, you superstitious, abusive bastards./

Dawn drew even with her. “And me!” she piped up, one-hundred-percent with the save-Tara club.

Behind them, Tara was now sniffling. 

“Is this a joke?” Mr. Nasty Patriarch Predator exclaimed, apparently stunned at being faced down by females. “I'm not gonna be threatened by two little girls.”

Asshole.

“You don't wanna mess with us,” Dawn answered him, and crossed her arms. 

“Yeah. She's a hair-puller.” Dawn would so do serious damage to these idiots. Hell, she could scream them deaf with her voice alone.

“And...” Giles replaced his glasses. “…You're not just dealing with, ah, two little girls.”

Xander stepped up. “You're dealing with all of us.”

/I love you, Xander. You too, Giles./

“Uh, yeah,” Jonathan put in. “We’re all really powerful witches, so, um, I’d run if I were you.”

Kudos to Jonathan, who couldn’t conjure a butterfly without a book in the right language and seven pounds of paraphernalia and an hour of full-silent concentration.

“I, um, don’t really care,” Andrew put in, shrinking back. “I don’t really know these people? I’ll just see myself out.”

“Get the bloody hell out then, before I bite you,” Spike growled. 

“This is insane. You people have no right to interfere with Tara's affairs. We are her blood kin! Who the hell are you?” Tara’s dad-monster was pretty much just shocked, now, that so many people would take his daughter’s part.

/You thought divide-and-conquer would work, didn’t you, you ass?/ Buffy smiled at Tara, surrounded now by all the Scoobies in a loose semicircle and being held by Willow. She was on her feet now, thank god, her girlfriend’s arm around her shoulders; and she was crying. But they were tears of amazed relief this time instead of fear. 

She no longer looked shrunken or small. “We're her  _ family _ ,” Buffy told the nasty man softly and very firmly.

Tara let out a little sob that sounded like triumph.

“Daaad,” Donny whined into the ringing silence, “you… You gonna let 'em just...” He stomped forward, waving his finger in Tara’s face. “Tara, if you don't get in that car, I swear by God I will beat you down!”

/Ooooh, no you didn’t!  _ Please _ try./

“Can I bite him, Slayer? Maybe just a little?”

Buffy found herself wavering, just this time. If anyone needed draining, it was these two jerks… and maybe even the hateful chick, Beth.

“I swear by your full and manly beard,” Xander chimed in on cue, “you're gonna break something trying.” As he said it, he shot a brief, approving look in Spike’s direction. Male solidarity. Neither of them were fans. And these were the times when Buffy really remembered why she loved Xander Harris. It was in the times when his heart was in the right place.

Donny shuffled back, quelled.

Beth pulled up all her supercilious superiority. “Well. I hope you'll all be happy hanging out with a disgusting demon.” 

Spike snorted. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“Huh?”

From the back, Anya lifted her hand. “Excuse me.  _ What _ kind?”

Beth blinked, still more thrown. “What?”

“What kind of demon is she?” Anya elaborated. “There're a lot of different kinds. Some are very, very evil.” She gave a little self-satisfied nod. “Some have been considered to be useful members of society.”

Buffy wondered very strongly sometimes exactly how much demon Anya had left in her. Had D’hoffryn really removed Anya’s demon soul, or was that just a convenient fiction she had sold them all to keep the formerly-very-prejudiced Slayer from chasing her down and whacking her head off? Because nothing said it had to be tied to the power-center. It really was, in the end, just a necklace. It didn’t have to in any way be the seat of a soul.

“Well said, Honey.” Xander actually sounded proud of his sometime girlfriend for making the point that there were good demons in the world, which was… new.

“Thanks, Sweetie.” Anya beamed at him, and maybe there was hope there?

Beth was obviously unsure how to face this particular onslaught on her worldview. “Well, I… I...” Then she firmed up, back into her bitchy little rage-on. “What does it matter?”

Dad Maclay jumped back in as well, unshaken. “Evil is evil.”

“Well, let's just narrow it down.” Anya clearly felt like she was onto something.

Silence. No narrowing.

“Ohhh.” Spike’s voice made Buffy jump, it was so unexpected; as was the sudden wash of amused condescension from him on their link. Glancing around them, he touched Buffy lightly on the arm as if to give her a personal warning about something, then stepped away from her, toward Tara. “Why don't I make this simple?” And drawing very, very near to the now very startled witch, he leaned over her neck.

“Spike, what…” Willow began, horrified. He ignored her to draw in a long, deep pull of her girlfriend’s scent.

Tara shivered involuntarily, and quailed away in automatic response, because right now, Spike was being a full-on, unshielded predator. /Oh jeez, Spike./

He exhaled then, slow and savoring, and opened slow, lazy eyes. “Mmm. No demon in there. Just one very tasty human girl.”

“What the hell is this man doing to my daughter? What goes on in this disgusting, depraved…”

Spike grinned, leaned away from Tara’s neck to regard her bastard of a father… and very abruptly fanged out. “That explain it to you, you poxy, lyin’ bastard?”

Mr. Maclay reeled back as if he’d been shot in the chest, a high-pitched noise of alarm escaping from his throat. Beth ‘eeped’ and stumbled into a shelving unit behind her. Donny started to mumble ‘ohgod ohgod ohgod’ over and over again. Buffy thought she smelled piss on the air and glanced over… and yes! Tara’s abusive older brother had a growing wet spot on the left front of his jeans, and trickling down one leg. 

Served the bastard right. “This man,” Buffy informed them all flatly, “is a  _ real _ demon, just like Anya used to be one, so they ought to know whether or not Tara is one too. Not that that would matter one way or another whether we wanted her to stay with us, since obviously if we already have an ex-demon and a current one in our group—and me—we shouldn’t worry too much about adding another one into the mix…”

“Who  _ are _ you people?” Dad Maclay demanded, horrified.

“She is the terror that stakes in the night,” Xander quipped, sounding like he was quoting something.

Jonathan let out a high-pitched giggle. “He is the hungry stomach… that churns in her wake!” He slapped his hand into Xander’s. 

Xander nodded at him. Jonathan nodded back. “We… are the Darkness Hunt!”

From back where he huddled near the rear door, that Andrew kid called to them in a low voice, “Okay, did you two practice that? Because it was really good. Maybe better even than the original  _ Darkwing Duck _ tagline.”

Buffy sighed and rolled her eyes at the geek gallery which constantly surrounded her. She had watched that cartoon maybe twice back in the day, though she now recognized the reference. “Way to spoil the mood, you guys.” 

“Doesn’t matter, pet,” Spike insisted, now leaning casually back against the counter behind Willow and a confused but slowly unwinding Tara. “I get it now. It's just a family legend, am I right?” Completely forgetting Giles’ rule for a second, he tugged out his pack of cigarettes and tapped it once against his palm, decisively. “Just a bit of spin to keep the ladies in line.” He tugged one of the cigarettes out, seated it between his lips. Nodded. “Would say I like you, piece of work that you are, but…” He shot a glance at Tara, shook his head grimly. “Like the bird more, so I’m thinkin’ maybe I’ll just drain you dry instead.”

Mr. Maclay got even angrier, if that was possible. “You get away from my daughter, you freak. Tara. Come home with me this instant! We need to get you away from these… These…”

Tara had turned away from her family, though, eyes flicking briefly from Spike’s assured mien to land on Willow’s sparkling eyes. “I’m not a demon?”

“I’d love you anyway, but no. No, baby. You’re not a demon.”

Tara’s tentative smile had made a comeback, huge; almost blinding. Her eyes jumped away again to meet Spike’s lazy gaze. “I’m not a demon?”

“Could bite you to prove it, pet, if you like. Would only take a sip, an’ I could tell you ‘xactly how much human’s in your blood. Could be you have a touch in you. Loads of humans do. Doubt there’d be enough to do more’n give you an edge.” He smirked. “Got a private bet with m’self Harris here has some; and Red too, for that matter.” He lifted his brows then, gave her a very recognizable, sultry little leer. “How ‘bout it, then? Little nip, between friends?”

Tara blushed incredibly brightly, turning roughly the color of a sunset over the Pacific. Willow gaped at him, horrified and maybe slightly angry.

“Alright, alright,” Buffy broke in, and strode over to grab him by the lapels and drag him back home where he belonged. He was getting carried away. “Overdoing it much?” she hissed.

“Don’t be jealous, love,” he murmured back, still all fangy. “Was just an offer.”

She was going to have his ass after this was all over.

The minute Spike was gone from their sphere, Tara and Willow seemed to forget him in favor of smiling hugely at each other. Relieved, Buffy turned back to Tara’s creepy family, though she kept one hand firmly on her vampire’s leather coat to rein him in. He was having just way too much fun playing the animated trump card right now. 

Beside her, Dawn still stood with arms crossed, ready to throw down. Buffy wasn’t sure when she had seen her sister wear such a steely glare. Giles stood behind them, doing the Ripper-face and being all resolved, which was awesome. Xander and Anya, off to one side, were ready to back whatever move anyone made. Jonathan, next to them, looked nervous as always, but prepared to do whatever was asked of him. Good deal. 

“Mr. Maclay, I believe your business here is finished.” Giles’ voice was uncompromising.

Mr. Maclay ignored him. “Tara,” he insisted, eyes on the daughter who no longer cowered before him. “For eighteen years your family has taken care of you and supported you. If you want to turn your back…”

For the first time, probably in her entire life, Tara Maclay interrupted the man she called ‘sir’. Standing straight up, she disengaged from her Willow-shaped support to walk right up to him. Stood in front of him on her own two feet, straight and tall, and, without the slightest stutter, said, “Dad. Just go.”

God, it was beautiful.

And it was enough. The old bastard scowled, turned, and without another word, headed for the door. It was obvious that he knew his hold over his slave-girl of a daughter was permanently broken.

Donnie Maclay stared at his sister in confusion, eyes darting to the rest of them as if he was afraid they would, one by one, turn into monsters. Then, with piss staining one leg of his jeans, Tara’s brother backed toward the door alongside their father. 

Beth was already there, hand on the knob. Buffy thought she’d been there approximately since the game face had come out to play.

Donny scampered out with Beth the minute they hit the door. Mr. Maclay, though, paused before he exited to glare around the room, eyes lighting on each one of them. Disgust twisted his expression for a moment. “Magic,” he hissed, and was gone. 

The door fell closed with a tiny  _ ting _ from the bell.

Spike’s head dropped immediately to the curve of Buffy’s neck, his breath whuffling cool and fangy there. “Can I go out and bite just  _ one _ of ‘em? Please, Slayer? If I promise not to do ‘em in completely?”

Oh, he so needed settling down. He was  _ vibrating _ . “Spike,” she warned, low and pointed.

He twiddled the unlit cigarette between his fingers, antsy. “Spoilsport.”

“I’m with Spike,” Anya put in from somewhere behind them. "Tara, if I were to contact some old coworkers who specialize in abusive families, would you be all that put out?”

Tara was silent for a long moment, then… “Let me… think about it,” she murmured a little wonderingly.

“You do that. Because putting aside whatever they did or didn’t do to you, I don’t even want to think about what life must have been like for your mother, and your grandmother, and any aunts still living; what they might still be doing to any other female in your extended clan. And that kind of thing needs to be stopped.” Anya sounded nothing if not deeply invested in said outcome. Not that Buffy blamed her.

The Maclay clan—or, at least the male members thereof—were in for a world of hurt. Buffy kind of thought maybe Anya might end up contracting out with or without Tara’s permission, if only against the satellite members of the bunch, to put an indirect halt to things. And, really, she honestly thought the ex-demon would be right to do it.

“Oookay,” Dawn put in to break the subsequent, taut silence, “birthday party?”

“Oh. Yeah. Baby, we need to get back and get ready. Because I don’t know about you, but creepy demon blood, so not with the sexy party vibe.” Willow sounded super relieved to have a nice subject change. “Unless… Are you okay to do a party? Are you… How are you?”

Tara laughed; a little, light, full-throated sort of laugh that sounded exceedingly genuine. “Oh, Willow; I am so okay. I’m better than okay. Yeah. Let’s go change and go to my party.” Buffy wasn’t sure she had ever heard this girl sound so assertive, or so open. So unbothered.

“We need to change too,” Buffy put in. “We can give you a ride back to campus, right Spike?”

Still in game face, Spike rumbled against her and muttered something about getting her naked. Buffy very suddenly remembered her past resolution to let him dress her, and shivered.

“First, please, if you would be at all willing to help with the cleanup,” Giles begged, all Ripper gone in favor of Mr. Tweed. “I daresay it would be quite difficult to match today’s sales tomorrow with so many dead demons littering the shop…”

“Oh. Yeah. Sure…”

“Would rather soddin’ bite somebody.” Spike’s eyes drifted around the room, as if cataloguing the possible treats, and okay, now. That was enough. 

“I think there was one in that back room,” Buffy put in, and grabbed his collar firmly.  _ “Wasn’t _ there, Spike?” And she dragged him very firmly off toward the back door.

And halted in stunned amazement when she got a good look at what she had thought was meant to be just a long, empty storage room.

“Like it, pet?” Spike murmured, crowding in close against her neck. His hands dragged up under her camisole to shudder deliciously against the skin of her belly. “Rupert, Mum, and I thought you might like a bit of a dojo; somewhere away from the crypt, where you could slaughter defenseless dummies without fallin’ into graves or breakin’ stone…”

He was wonderful. And amazing. And she was so going to jump his bones.

There was a crossbow target! And a knife-throwing one, there against the wall. And a karate dummy on a swivel-set, with a bunch of wooden peg-arms, and a set of judo-mats over there to one side for practicing throws, and…

She had him against the wall in a trice, his jeans down in another second. 

“Mikey, I think she likes it,” he chuckled, then hissed as her mouth closed around his cock. 

Not for long, though. That was just a little thank you, and then she was up and had him shoved against the closest wall. “You don’t bite anyone but me!” she pointed out, and slammed his shoulders hard into the bricks.

He grinned and bit his lower lip, just daring her. “No playing with the friends, is it?”

“You asshole.” And she swarmed up onto him, grabbed him up tight in her hand. “No, because you’re  _ mine!” _

He swung around, slammed her into the wall in turn. She heard a few bricks crack,  _ oofed _ at the impact.  _ Uhn _ , but that felt nice. Solid. She dragged her hands through his hair, tugged his head back down into the crease of her neck. 

“Territorial, aren’t we?” he informed her throat, and chuckled again. But he was already inching her skirt up.

She kicked him firmly in the butt with her heel, because,  _ dammit _ . “I already share you enough, bastard!” Why wasn’t he already inside of her? She ground a little against his pubic bone, pissed off and helpless with it.

His head lifted away, his fingers splayed over her cheek. “Oh, love,” he whispered then, and his eyes were insanely blue and sparkling on hers, and where the  _ hell _ had his game face gone? “You have never, even once, shared me.” And dropping his hand from her face, he slipped it under her butt, lifted her.

“Oh, God,” she breathed, as he entered her; and then it was just grinding flicks of his thumb that made her moan, and long, slow, measured strokes that made her eyes roll back in her head… and he didn’t go back into game face until she was convulsing around him. And when he bit her, it was a ceremonial thing that was barely enough to remind them both of who they were, and why.

But it  _ was _ enough to leave them both hanging there, against the wall, gasping and hardly able to stand, for a while.

“I just wanted you to know,” Buffy whispered, “that you’re mine.”

“Noted,” he breathed back, and trailed his tongue lightly over the swollen new punctures. 

She shivered. “Also, I decided earlier that I was exhausted, and you should pick out what I was going to wear for Tara’s party while I took a brief mental vacation. Which still sounds like a really good idea.”

He lifted away from her, Captain Blue Eyes again, to regard her in surprise and not a little suspicion. “You do know how much trouble I could get into with an offer like that, don’t you, pet?”

“I’m trusting you to walk the fine line.”

“Dangerous proposition.” 

“Be civilized. Ish. Also, you’re supposed to be playing chauffeur right about now.”

He snorted and pulled away to gently disengage, fumbled around for what looked like a stack of sweat-towels. “You sure know how to put your property through his paces, luv.”

She grinned at him as she cleaned up and dropped her skirt back down. “You saying you wanna tap out?”

“Never in life. C’mon. Let’s go get you ready for a nice party.”

***

Willow and Tara rode back to campus with them, snuggling in the backseat and really just kind of in their own little world. Which was nice, because so were the folks in the front seat, though Buffy was also really glad for Tara to have escaped the clutches of such a truly evil birth-family. Buffy had no idea what it must be like to be so…  _ used _ like that by the people who were supposed to love you the most, but she did know what it was like to be misunderstood for something inside you that you couldn’t change about yourself. To have to run away, start over all alone. How frightening and bleak that could be, and how to build your own family out of a bunch of similar misfits. How to have that become everything you were… and what it was like to be terrified that that family, in turn, might judge you, turn you out, when they were the only safe place you had left. 

God, no wonder Tara had been so tentative with the Scoobies. And wow. /She chose  _ us _ ./

The Scoobies had their flaws, but they made for a really good chosen family; at least in Buffy’s experience. She hoped they would live up to Tara’s good opinion. They needed to. She had eschewed everything she had ever known to stay here, with them, instead.

/I get that. I gave up everything I could have had to have this. Or, I risked it. I get it. Sometimes… the risk is worth it, when everything around you gets toxic, because no matter how much you need the love, you need the acceptance more./

Sometimes, challenging the status quo was the only way to get things to change.

They landed at the parking lot outside the dorm where Wil mostly lived with Tara now, and dropped the girls off. “Be back in a few,” Buffy called. 

They giggled and nodded and bounced out. Willow ducked her head back into the car and flashed them a grin full of plans. “Don’t hurry.” And she slammed the door shut.

Waiting outside, Tara blushed really, really hard.

“Someone’s about to get some birthday sex,” Buffy opined as they headed off across campus.

“Good on her,” Spike answered as he guided them back onto the short service road out onto University Row. “Chit deserves it.”

Once back in front of the dorm Buffy technically shared with Willow—though, really, Buffy mostly shared it with Spike, now—they piled out and headed upstairs. Spike was such a feature in the building at this point that he even shared a snarky, sardonic hi-five with one of the stoners who passed him in the hall on the way to the door. “Hey, dude. Keep meaning to ask you, where’d you get the rings?”

“Ate a bloke at a metal festival,” Spike answered, and leered.

The stoner, by name, Kevin, blinked. “Woah, man. I don’t roll that way. But whatever floats your boat, huh?” And he backed off slowly, teetering, to slip into his bedroom.

Buffy rolled her eyes as she turned to unlock her door. “Smooth.”

“Wonder if he got scared off because I got ‘em at a metal show, or ‘cause he thought I shagged a bloke?” Spike pondered as he followed her in.

“Did you?” Buffy inquired sweetly.

“Would’ve likely rocked his world,” Spike answered blandly, and headed straight to her closet to parse through the options there. Turned, squinted a little to eye her where she lay, spread-eagled on the bed like an offering. “Was too hungry. Didn’t have the time.”

“Remind me never to play the ‘list of people you’ve screwed’ game with you. I mean, we already know you win, but still.”

He scoffed. “Got a few years on you, pet. Here.” And he tugged out a predictably see-through cami; the white one with the lacy flowers, narrowed his eyes at her as he held it up. “Yeah. This one’ll do nicely. Show up fair in the shite light in that dive, makes your hair look lovely. Though…” He paused, frowning a little. “The green-toned ones look a treat with your eyes…”

She smiled, delighted by him. He was so  _ earnest _ about it. “All of the green ones are, like, sweaters, or turtlenecks. Too hot for dancing.”

He tossed the lacy cami onto the bed next to her. “Well, then, they’re right out. Want to be able to touch as much of you as I can get away with when I dance with you out there, love, and drive us both mad with it.”

“You act like we haven’t had sex already today.”

“Means nothin’ and you know it. ‘Specially when I watch you move.” Turning to her dresser, he reached in, rummaged through the pants drawer, probably looking for the leather ones. “First time I saw you, you were dancing. ‘Bout drove me clean out of my soddin’ mind. No Slayer I’d ever seen before was ever so carefree; just livin’ her best life like that. So bloody sensual, without even bein’ on the hunt. Couldn’t get you out of my head after that.” He lifted his eyes to her then. “Ever.” And his eyes burned on hers. “Love dancing with you, Buffy.”

Nnnnggggah... /Why do you have to turn me on so much?/

***

Dancing with Spike was, as always, a good game, whether they did it on the dance floor of the Bronze, or on the practice floor, or out there in the night, against a dozen hungry demons. Here, she barely noticed the other bodies around them as he tugged her up close, his fingers digging hard into her butt and grinding her into him, his face eternally buried at her throat while she kept her fingers settled at the nape of his neck, stroking into the soft hair there, and nipped at the sensitive skin behind his ear, and whispered things to him about how he was hers, because it drove him wild… and they  _ moved _ together.

_ Probably _ you could call it dancing. If you were creative.

Tara’s party had gone off without a hitch, as if the evening were trying to make up for the earlier fiasco with her family. She was now the proud owner of several new books on various kinds of Goddesses and plant- and Earth-magick, an absolutely massive crystal ball from Giles, a neat amethyst pendulum-thing from Jonathan with a bunch of little stones on it that he said were ‘in the colors of the chakras’, a huge, gorgeous geode from Xander, who had completely given up on the books and had just shot for, ‘She likes rocks, right? Pretty rock’… and, from Dawn, a regular household straw-broom wrapped in a bow, as a joke, because she was a huge, adoring dork. (Tara looked like she was actually uber-touched by the broom-gift, and hugged Dawn and giggled with her over it kind of excessively while Dawn pretended to ride it around through the bubbles Willow was blowing around the room the whole time like she was trying to turn the Bronze into some kind of pixie chill spot.)

At some point, between riding herd on a completely out-of-control Dawn, who was spending way too much time racing through the crowd and complaining about the ‘no alcohol’ stamp on her hand, “As if I wanted to drink, like a loser. Drinking is so lame!”, Tara came up to Buffy where she was leaning against the upstairs landing support pole. “Hey.”

“Hey, Tara. Happy birthday!”

Tara smiled,  _ without _ looking at the ground. She glanced briefly away from Buffy, over to where Spike was cleaning Xander’s clock at pool, then back again. “I just wanted to say… that if I didn’t know you were with…” She stopped, and did look down this time. “I almost did this spell, when I found out they were here. To hide, because I thought if none of you saw that I was… That maybe I could stay. A spell to make demons invisible…”

Buffy dropped her crossed arms and stared. “You wanted to make yourself invisible? Tara…”

“I know. It was dumb. But then I realized… maybe you guys wouldn’t care.” She lifted her gaze again, fastened it bravely on Buffy’s stunned face. “Because you’re with Spike, and Xander’s… kind of with Anya, and no one cares about them. And Willow used to date Oz, who was kind of a part-time demon… so maybe it would be okay if… If she was with me, even if I was a demon, you know, full-time. So… I just wanted to say that I really think it’s cool. Really open-minded, of you. You know. That you’re dating him. More than dating, I guess. That you gave him that much of a chance; to get to know him that well. That you trust him with your family, even though he’s…”

Buffy sighed and leaned in to touch Tara’s upper arm. “Because it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter. To any of us, okay, Tara? Demons are people who just happen to be… demons, you know? Some are bad, some are good, just like humans.” Buffy made a serious face. “Some humans are worse than others.” /Not to name names./ “So are some demons. And some are better.” She tried a faint, if slightly pained shrug, and dropped her hand away. “I didn’t use to get that, but I do now.”

Tara nodded, accepting this. “I’m… I didn’t either, I guess? But I see how the Scoobies all, you know, accept that you’re with him, and are okay with it, and I guess I’m just…” She swallowed. “It’s… nice. And I realized… maybe I could stay. It made me brave enough to… almost believe it.”

The repercussions of loving Spike kept rippling outward. And they all seemed good. Buffy drew in a serious breath, smiled at the shy girl who seemed, now, so much less shy. Bolstered. “Then I’m really,  _ really _ glad. Because you belong here, Tara. Not there. Here, with us.”

Then Xander was at Tara’s elbow like a jack-in-the-box, a blue plastic cup in either hand. “Here, m’lady. Imbibe, for it is your blessed natal day.” And he mostly didn’t splash her with the contents.

Tara’s lips twitched. “I think maybe you’re drunk, sir.”

Buffy twitched right along with her. “I think maybe you’re right.”

“I,” Xander insisted, “am in no way too impaired to serve drinks to lovely ladies. Here, oh ye Slayer of the hearts of the beasties!” And he handed Buffy the other cup, filled with something wafty and majorly alcoholic. “Drink up, and get your dance on, for the night is young.”

“Anya,” Buffy called over his head, “I think you have about ten minutes before Xander falls out. He’s talking kind of medieval-y.” 

“Oh, for goodness sake,” Anya answered, and shouldered her way into the fray. “I hate it when he does that. Next he’s going to start asking me to knight him ‘Sir Licksalot’. Which is really just mostly wishful thinking, because soon he’s going to pass out…” 

Spike, who had followed Xander to the group to see what had become of his opposite number, lifted a snarky brow and started chortling really hard. Anya ignored her fellow demonic alum to grab her boyfriend’s shoulder. “Come on, Xander. Time for bed.”

At that very inopportune moment Dawn wandered up, expression reading a very clear intrigued. “Is this one of those conversations I’m supposed to pretend I didn’t hear?”

/Oh jeez./ “Go to your room, Dawn.”

Dawn rolled her eyes. “As if!” And she grabbed Spike’s elbow and dragged him with her to plunge back into the crowd, the vampire still chuckling helplessly.

“And on that note,” Willow put in, brightly, and took Tara’s cup from her. She set it aside on the table next to their couch, then held out her hand in similarly courtly manner. “May I have this dance?”

Tara curtsied. “You may.”

And off they went.

Buffy watched them dance for a while, smiling. She could swear, as they held each other, made out a little, did some more snuggling, that they were floating, which was… Well. A thing, for sure. And where the hell had Dawn taken  _ her _ squeeze? She could stand to dance with him again.

Well. She could always stand to dance more with her vampire, but…

Oh. They were out there just a little ways off from Wil and Tara… busy being completely adorable. Spike had Dawn standing on his boots like she was five, while he swirled her around in a circle. Dawn’s hair was swinging wildly out in a huge arc, and she was laughing her head off. Oh my god, that was cute.

Fine. There was time. There would always be time. Tonight was a night for family. And the one Buffy had was really, really good.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
May her so-called family's entrails be munched slowly by a trio of vengeful justice demons with murder on their minds. Let us all grab some spoons and carve them up slowly, starting with dad.   
  
I can't with those people.  
Spike really should've just eaten them.


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I attempted to get more accomplished in this chapter than I ended up doing, but then Jonathan jumped in and got way more interesting, all of a sudden, than I had any right to expect, and made the setup take a little longer than I'd thought it would, so... Well. Most of the upcoming shenanigans will have to wait for the next chapter. There are, however, a few hints buried in here as to what's rolling off the line in future chapters.
> 
> Everyone give love to wolf_shadoe, for she is teh awesome, and also the reason why we have dozens of chapters all ready and waiting for postage at the drop of a hat!

Giles was getting ready to wrap stuff up here for a while and take a trip back to England; unofficially to ‘visit a sick relative’ (that excuse was for the visa people). Really, though, it was to try to discuss the whole ‘unbeatable new demon on the hellmouth’ situation with the Council in person, tell them about the slew of Slayer dreams Buffy had had about this ‘Key’ business, and, if necessary and they knew anything about Spike, run interference for Buffy. He said he felt okay with leaving at the moment, since Anya really pretty much had everything well in hand at the store, and it was chugging along nicely enough at this point, a couple of weeks in, for him to feel like he could leave it in her capable hands. He did, though, have Jonathan and Willow co-running the shifts Anya couldn’t take because of the gallery—very few, since Mom was doing so much better now, with the new med—and not too scary a prospect anymore, since Jonathan had weirdly come into his own there at the Magic Box. 

He had started to show a really interesting side of his personality in there, actually; super knowledgeable, open, willing to hang out and explain stuff to customers with incredible patience without going overboard on the info-dump to chase them away with his enthusiasm, always in calm, quiet, even tones. On top of that, he pretty much always seemed to know what he was talking about, since he knew at least a little bit about practically every subject; like he was born to do this job. 

He also always had a broom in hand, for some reason, like he was eternally prepared to chase away invisible dust-bunnies, as if to say, ‘this was the way I started and this is the way I’ll continue’… but he did the job and he did it well. He managed the register efficiently enough to impress even Anya, took care of his receipts with a quiet competency so that she had no complaints, and wrapped up everything with an odd sort of uncomplaining chill and a look of satisfaction about him that kind of made Buffy wonder if the little guy had always just wanted a place to belong.

When Willow joined in, she was better on the floor than at the register. She wasn’t so great with the taking money and keeping track of receipts part of things, but she was way enthusiastic about the sales part, encouraging people to buy things in wild flights of stream-of-consciousness, connect-the-dots, big-brain relationships. “Oh! If you’re into herbs for dreaming, there’s also this great article I just read in _The Mind,_ about how if you sew mugwort into a little pillow and stick it under your head while you sleep, you can train yourself to lucid-dream within about a day and a half…” 

Sometimes she inspired sales. Sometimes she scared off the more tentative browsers who had just come in for a nice, cool-looking pendant. A few times, her receipts and her till didn’t match up completely.

She drove Anya crazy. 

Jonathan was the voice of reason between them; calm, rational, the mediator, weird as that sounded. He spent a lot of time between them, hands up to their chests, speaking quietly and rationally about how they both had their strengths and they should play to them to make the store an even greater success while Giles was gone, and even after.

Watching the three of them actually kind of flipped Buffy out. She spent a lot of time away, because it gave her the wig to be near it.

It also wigged her out hella bad that they couldn’t find their latest adversary anywhere in town. Neither fake-tanned hide nor bottle-blonde, permed hair of her. Buffy hadn’t had any new dreams or meditations on the crazybitch, even; though not for lack of trying. Just a maddening radio-silence stretching on through the weeks since their frightening tete a tete at the warehouse. She had even given in and stooped to meditating with Giles, more than once, before he left. Heck, she even tried it with Spike once or twice, though the attempt had been approached, on her vampire’s part, with a vast discomfort and reluctance. 

He was in no way a fan of the idea of touching foot in the Slayer dreamscape, ever again. 

She met with Sineya several times both with and without her vampire-leopard ally, to discuss how the Line, alive inside her, felt about being mated, to kibitz about this new big bad of theirs, chitchat about being the guardian of a mystical Key; all of it. And what she got was interesting, of course, but none of it was all that revelatory with regard to their threat-on-hiatus. Just a lot of strange hints about the Line being at rest now, which was maybe worrying? Sineya spent a lot of time in the dream laying around, at least; lazing in the sun and licking her paws where the marks of captivity were healing around her feline wrists and throat, though she still kept her guard up, nostrils flaring and ears swiveling, jerking her head around to glance at the horizon whenever she heard something that concerned her. And for the first time, Buffy saw the village in the distance; the people Sineya guarded… but the cat was distant from them as ever. 

She just wasn’t staying away from them now because she was bound in a cave, alone. She was staying away from them now of her own accord, because she was… happy in the recognition of her otherness, but now completed in it? At least, that was how it felt. 

There was also some other weird mumbo-jumbo in there about, maybe, the Key? Which, okay. It was just bizarre to realize that those dreams were about Dawn, now. In the dream, she and Spike—as cats, of course—lay cuddled around their warm, glowing ball of light. Only, this time, Buffy could tell the difference between this one and the one they had mistaken for the Dagon Sphere. This one was all diffuse around the edges, with no real specific ending, and didn’t really seem to be a solid object. It was more… energy. It was radiant, and golden, and had an intensity and a sort of pulsing, incandescent luminosity that was incredibly vivid; almost too vivid.

Now, Buffy could recognize it as her sister. Dawn was like that. All over the place, just spazzing with her own brightness, too intense and too loud to control herself sometimes. 

Spike, all leopardy, spent his time cuddling the Key defensively, playing with it as he did so, if in an incredibly loving way, as she approached across the dream-desert. Giving in, she’d joined him. Lain down to curve herself around, feet to his feet, head to his head, so that their paws could, together, join in the task of lovingly batting the joyous brightness around within the protective curve of their mirrored bodies.

It was a light, without form… but it almost felt like… theirs. Their child, to keep safe, keep whole. /Ours, between us, to protect./

Then, behind them, something loomed again. It didn’t ask where its Key was… and oddly, at least to Buffy’s mind, the presence seemed muffled. And… male?

Okay, weirdness.

Obviously they needed more 411 about their adversary. Which meant calling all possible outlets into the dreamscape, since said adversary was currently in the wind. Not Buffy’s first choice, to get all cozy over the phone with her dear sister-Slayer. Also, talking with Faith like they were on the same side, after everything they’d just been through as pretty much enemies? Mega with the weird, and not exactly the most comfortable conversation in the universe. But the mission sometimes called you to do things you didn’t necessarily want to do, so right after their original run-in with the rando blonde, she picked up the damn phone and got to work anyway, like a big girl. And Faith answered, and talked to her, probably for the same damn reason. 

The other Slayer, though, hadn’t really given them anything new on chickmonster. ‘Yeah, B. Actually kinda glad to hear there’s a reason I keep dreaming about turning into a big damn… what’re they called? I don’t know from cats. Some kind of damn wild desert one. Seemed like it’d be good at hunting. Whatever. Anyway; and about having some kind of chains and a collar broken off in a cave somewhere. Which, I gotta tell ya; ever since I first had that dream I’ve been feelin’ a helluva lot more chill lately. More limber and loose, if that makes any sense.’

It had taken talking to Spike afterward to work that one out. She wasn’t used to thinking of herself and Faith as essentially sharing the same demon-essence or whatever, but she supposed that in a way, they did. And talk about too much intimacy with Faith, and oogy much, that they were, in a way, part of each other? 

But it also explained the weirdness between them; the draw toward one another, and yet the odd repulsion; the pull to battle one another, the feeling like that old show, _The Highlander;_ like there could be only one. Like they were two magnets facing each other with the same polarity or whatever; just pushing and pushing. Too much alike; not opposites, like them and vamps, drawn to each other in a deadly dance.

The Slayer essence, the Line, had had to split itself to be in the both of them at the same time. They were both expressions of the same being, sort of; and with Spike, she had mated it. It was no longer alone. Which meant that, strangely, it sounded like Faith, too, shared in the relief that had come of their having given surcease to millennia of loneliness. Not the transient loneliness of the singular girl carrying the essence, but the endless, driven, maddened, aching loneliness of a being that had never been understood or companioned or permitted a moment’s rest in ten thousand years or more of ceaseless combat, and along with it… yes. The imprinted memories of thousands upon thousands of lost girls sacrificed to the cause for which it had been torn from its instinctive roots, rerouted in them, and trammeled to do the bidding of a bunch of scared old men who had forced a captive young girl to fight their battles for them. 

In their conversation, Faith had paused briefly; a pause fraught with something being held back, then, ‘What’s damn strange is, after I busted out of that shitty cave, a bunch of old bastards in turbans told me I had a choice to make. They herded me down in front of a bunch of little fuckin’ huts full of scared shitless people, on lockdown, y’know? In the dark, with two paths in front of me. Just kickin’ it in the middle of the damn desert, with one path goin’ into ‘em, and one of ‘em goin’ out into the night, goin’ who the hell knows where. I guess where I could go seek my fortune; just a Slayer, fancyfree. No job, no mission. Which was real goddamned appealing, let me tell you…’

Buffy had winced at that last, because well she understood the wish to just flee; leave the whole goddamned mess behind. And she knew the danger of it. A Slayer at loose ends was dangerous; to herself and to the world. Faith had already learned that, but would she remember it, now that Buffy had apparently freed them both?

‘…Especially when I started to hear the voices. Because when I looked that way and thought for a sec about what it would be like to just bail, I heard what sounded like a bunch of angry old men whispering shit about tools that had loosed their chains. Like I needed to do what those fuckers said, right? And anyway, that town looked like a shitty place to spend my life. Who the hell were these people, you know? Why should I care, or protect ‘em?’

/Oh, God… Faith, we still have powers. We still have to use ‘em right, or…/ 

Another short, tight pause, then, ‘So I almost did it. Almost took off for the hills. Like, who needs the misery? Even though… I know I owe the world some kind of… reparation or some shit; ‘cause did it have to be there?’ A heavy sigh. ‘But then I saw another wicked big fuckin’ cat pacing around out in front of the huts or whatever, just kind of wandering around all restless, waving his big ass tail around and dangling his balls, shaking his big stupid mane. Looking expectant, like he was waiting for me to help him out or some shit. Had a bunch of people behind him. Shadows mostly, though I think I saw maybe the outline of another cat. Some kind of big goddamn lioness or some shit behind him. Like they were waiting… I guess for me to do the right thing and back ‘em up. Fuck. I don’t know; it’s not like they needed any more firepower...’

Buffy found herself seriously wondering who the other cat was; the female one. But by the description, she had already guessed who the first one was. 

‘Anyway; I just know I had a choice to make.’ A brief hesitation. ‘And I think the big fuckin’ lion was our boy Angel…’

On the money. /Yeah, sure. A vision; like hopefully you haven’t done anything with him that  _ brought _ him there!/ Angel, of all vampires, invited to the Slayer dreamscape… It sounded worrying as hell from Buffy’s perspective. With his weakness? /Oh hell no./ 

But more importantly, who was the other lion? Some other vamp? 

‘Or at least, I recognized that snarl; like a warning. Big ass fangs and everything. And I knew my work with him wasn’t done yet, so…’ Buffy could almost hear her shrug. ‘I schlepped my ass down into those stupid huts and got to work.’

It was actually a relief to hear it, mysteries or no. 

And it bugged the hell out of Buffy to this day wondering who the fuck the other cat was in Faith’s dream. Because if Angel was working with another vamp in LA without telling anyone…

But then, wouldn’t Faith have let her know something that big? 

/Unless  _ she _ doesn’t know…/

/Angel, what the hell are you up to down there?/

Last week, though, Faith actually called her; totally out of the blue. ‘Hey. B. Had another one. Thought you should know. I was up in the rocks, pretty far from the village. The big lion was standing down below at the crossroad thing. He kind of gave me a shove before I went up, like I came up there with his blessing; like I was on vacation or something. I was dodging a bunch of damn rocks or something, being thrown at me by some kind of tall, invisible shadow-giant or some shit, and those old guys were yelling at me again about being a tool, and not wearing my chains right, and how I needed to get back to being “a proper instrument” or some fuckin’ thing. Anyway, I thought you should know.’

It was the first dream Faith had ever reported that had featured anything related to Dawn, and it gave Buffy a serious wiggins. Because she had started to have her own series of recurring Slayer dreams about old-man voices yelling at her about not being an appropriate tool and crap like that. 

She thought it meant that the Council was on its way soon. Which was really shitty timing, what with everything. They so didn’t need to know about Dawn, or anything Key related. Buffy for sure didn’t need them coming here to try to tear her main support away from her right now when she was fighting to keep her sister out of the clutches of some crazed whatever-the-hell that bitch was!

It did kind of sound like the dream was telling Faith she could choose to stay and keep Angel in hand, or come back and help throw down with Buffy against those bastards. Which made sense, considering the Council would have just as much against Faith in this fight as they had against the vampire-lovin’ Slayer-senior, since Faith was now down in LA helping out Angel twenty-four-seven. But it was a risk, if Angel was going off the deep end again; pushing Faith away, maybe consorting with some other vamp or something. 

But on the other hand… /I guess I should try to remember that it’s really not a ‘One Girl’ scenario anymore, and all that crap. Really more like ‘One Girl on the hellmouth’ deal./ 

But did she dare ask Faith to come back and help deal with this crazy bitch, and the Watchers, and whatever else might jump off? Risk Angel maybe going off the deep end without her there; and maybe her too? The hellmouth vibe made people nuts, and who knew how much control Faith had managed to scrape together in the last few months. 

On the other  _ other _ hand, facing down the Council, when and if they eventually showed, was kind of also Faith’s prerogative. That was, if she wanted to get back on their radar at all, anyway. /Which she might not, considering, wetworks guys and stuff./ But Buffy supposed she should at least be invited, have the option. /If we can trust her./ 

Note to self to call Cordelia, feel around a little, see if Faith was really doing so great. If Cordy thought Faith was up to it. /And, while I’m at it, ask her if she knows what the hell Angel’s up to. Because if Faith knew, she’d sure the hell bring it up. She might have a soft spot for him, but she doesn’t screw around with vamps about to go off the reservation; and she knows not to fuck with Angelus./

Buffy surprised herself with hoping that whatever was going down in LA, it wouldn’t keep Faith there. /You’d think I’d want her as far from me as possible, busy down there. But…/ It sure wouldn’t hurt to have another Slayer around if things got any more dicey with this insane bitch-monster. /Not that I want someone I can’t trust at all hanging around if she ever discovered who the Key is, so maybe axe that./ They weren’t friends by any stretch.

On yet another hand, muscle was muscle, and muscle they needed, in this fight. And Cordelia had said the girl was doing better, last time she’d asked. /With two ‘One Girls’ and a Master Vampire, fighting something like this bleached ho would go a hell of a lot smoother. Maybe we could even take the bitch down./ 

Well, it would go down however it went down, she supposed. She couldn’t control Faith’s decision-making. She would just deal with the fallout whichever way it went. 

In the meantime, Mom’s demon art show went over without a hitch. The demon in question, a humble Praxis named Donavan, seemed so incredibly grateful to be sharing his weird sculptures to a wider audience that he practically bowed every time Mom entered the room. 

Mom also seemed to have zero real problems following his sibilant speech, even without Anya or Spike around to act as interpreter. The two of them actually ended up getting into a deep conversation about some couple called Ed and Nancy Kienholz that had Buffy staring at them both, nonplussed, and which had Spike jumping in to put in his two cents that this guy and his wife, whoever they were, were indeed, “a couple of bloody geniuses with the social commentary”. Which, like, seriously? Was she the literal only person in the entire room who didn’t get how smooshing a bunch of garbage and a mannequin into an old train car and then slicing it open for people to walk through it made it art?

Apparently she was in the minority about sculptures and stuff in general, though, because people bought Donavan’s stuff like woah, and it was, if possible, even more bizarre than the stuff in the book they pored over with photos of the Kienholz exhibit. That was to say, the showing was a success, both with the humans, Donavan hiding behind a screen and bouncing like a stoked kid the whole time, and with the demon world, Mom walking sedately beside him while they wandered between aisles of freaky demon-junk and repurposed whatever from, Buffy guessed, the landfill or something, chatting with Feravas and Brachens and Ano-Movics like it was nothing and shooting the breeze about ‘the unspoken red-lining that occurred when your species were invisible, and the fine art of making a comfortable living out of the remains of suburban waste’. 

Like, she got it. She truly did understand what they were saying. Just, did they have to say it by bringing the remains of said suburban waste into the gallery?

Mom, though, seemed thrilled afterward… and kind of filled with scary new purpose. “How the demons live, Buffy; even the nice ones! Isn’t there anything we can do about it?”

/Eee./ “Well… they’re kind of movin’ on up, Mom, since everyone started bailing after the whole Hellions crisis. I mean, there’s a whole family of Thricewises living a few doors down from us, over on Crawford—you’d never know, of course, with them, because they can totally pass. They have that, like, cloaking spell or whatever it is…” 

That one earned her a patented mom-look, as if she was missing the damn point. “Okay, yeah. And some half-Brachen are living in that apartment complex up on Rogets. And the Movics are all over that little development Century 21 was so desperate to get people into down there on Zoo Road, after basically everybody moved out because that one whole side of the street got torched? And I think there are a few Listers living up off of Orville, up by Logan Swamp…”

A dawdling customer hailed her right then, popping her head in the door to ask if it was too late to come back in and get “that one really lovely piece with the blue nacre insets, I just went and borrowed some money from my mother. I know you’re closing, but I really have my heart set on it.” 

Mom hustled off to take care of that whole thing, but her expression warned Buffy that that wasn’t the end of that particular conversation, and oh, man. This was going to become another crusade, wasn’t it, like the whole MOO thing. /Oh, jeez.../

Buffy did her best to stay away from home and the gallery for a while after that. She buried herself in school and in Spike and in looking for the latest evil hellspawn, and even in helping out at the Magic Box; and generally in just avoiding Mom whenever possible. /I mean, it’s not like I can change the world! I’m doing my best with Sunnydale, but I can’t make humanity accept all demonkind. Most people don’t even know they  _ exist _ to let ‘em have, you know, equal housing. I can’t, like, force the government to give them citizenship and home-loans. And the Mayor’s gone, so that route’s out. Isn’t it enough getting them ins with a few realtors and the cops, if they’re friendly?/

She was gone so much for a week and a half that Dawn probably thought she was avoiding  _ her _ , and got a tiny bit petulant about it; but thems were the breaks. It wasn’t about her at all, and really, what did she have to complain about? She should feel suffocated, stifled, an irritated teenage ball of annoyance. Either Buffy or Spike were on her about every second she wasn’t at school and Mom wasn’t with her till she was at home. But instead she was all Miss Resentful about Buffy—and thus, by simple math, Spike—hardly ever staying at the house anymore. “What, do we smell bad or something? I mean, you even keep coming up with excuses to avoid family dinner night! Or… Oh! You did something  _ wrong _ , didn’t you! Oooh, did Mom catch you boinking in the house? She  _ did _ , didn’t she? Oh, you’re in so much  _ trouble _ … Not that I think it even matters. We all know you guys do it, like, every spare second you can. I bet you’ve done it up against the wall outside. Wait.  _ Have _ you?”

Scratch that. Avoiding Dawn was a definite plus.

They would, of course, have to resume family dinners at some point. It was, after all, a weekly date, and they’d skipped two, what with one thing and another. First, Buffy had pled midterms and a massive amount of studying and essay-writing to do. Then, a slaying crisis. But… “C’mon, pet. Dunno what you’re on about, avoidin’ mum, but you and I both know we’re not gonna get away with it this week. You’re off school and it’s bleedin’ Thanksgivin’. Mum’s going to expect you to wield Slayer muscles and mash things and all that rot, innit?”

Buffy sighed heavily. She had long since invited everyone, of course. Which meant at least maybe she could avoid the conversation out of her mother’s deeply-ingrained thing about avoiding conflict in front of guests. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Any road, we have to go pick up the bird. And, I suppose, help Vengeance, Red, and Shorty close up shop before they kill each other.”

Buffy made a sour face. “Jonathan will probably ask us to invite Andrew, last minute, huh?”

Spike made a noncommittal sound that could have indicated either agreement or a lasting wish to sup on Andrew’s vital fluids. 

“What do you think of the guy?”

A faint, disdainful noise. “He’s a frightened rabbit. Won’t come into his own till he admits to himself he’s a poof. Once he does and stands up tall about it, he’ll do well enough. Till then he’ll just be a wee little man scared of his own shadow, in case anyone else sees it and remarks on what it means.”

As always, Spike’s assessments of people were pretty intensely scathing, and held nothing back. And, as always, Buffy couldn’t really argue with anything he said. “Harsh, but I don’t think you’re wrong.” And, stepping out of the DeSoto, she slipped around the vehicle to the driver’s side to get the back door for her guy. It was still early enough in the evening that he would have to make a dash into the dojo part of the store. 

Popping his door open, he made a run for the interior, duster yanked up over his head and fetched up against the practice dummy in the center of the room, lightly smoldering. 

“Your hair is smoking.”

Dropping the duster back down over his neck, Spike patted his moussed curls. “Way of the world, pet.”

“You lose that head of hair and there’ll be hell to pay,” she warned him.

“Keep pallin’ around with the soddin Slayer, playin’ with Mr. Bloody Sunshine,” he grumbled, but his heart wasn’t in it. 

And when she went primly by to open the inside door, he gave her a tweak on her butt that made her swing around and shoot him a mostly-playful glare. “Hey. You get one more today, buddy, and then you’re in trouble.”

“Love bein’ in trouble and you know it, Slayer.” And he waggled his eyebrows pointedly at her.

“You’re impossible.”

“You love me.”

With a sigh and a shake of her head, she sidled past him through the door. “Yeah, I do. For some inexplicable reason.”

He crowded close to follow her, and they moved through the short hall to the main store space. And walked right into what sounded like an argument. 

“…Are you two doing?” Anya, and sounding mighty suspicious.

“Oh, we're gonna try out a few spells…” Willow.

“There's this thing you can do where you create light, and we thought, what if you could make, like, simulated sunlight…” Tara broke in.

“Yeah, so then, you know, there Buffy is; middle of the night, and she finds this whole nest of vamps, a…and then she just goes, ‘Presto!’” The excitement was real.

“Only it won't be ‘presto’ exactly…” Tara added gently.

“And,  _ voom! _ There's a… A floating ball of sunlight! Vamps get dusty.” Wil actually dusted her hands as she said it, satisfaction leeching from her voice.

/Oh my God…/ Buffy walked a little further into the store, opened her mouth, her guy tense beside her and edging into outraged. 

“You don't wanna look right at it, though…” Tara was saying.

“Only one problem with this idea,” Buffy broke in. “I do all my vamp-dusting outings with a Master vampire at my side. If I used something like that, it’d take him out too.”

Willow blinked, eyes darting to a very edgy Spike. “Oh. Right.”

“Oh, yeah,” Tara echoed, sounding mortified. “I guess… not such a good idea.”

And now the shy girl sounded all freaked out; and she had just started coming out of her shell, was showing all this new confidence. Dammit. “It’s the thought that counts,” Buffy insisted. “And it’s a great idea on the surface of things. It’s just… I’d have to be out slaying alone, without my main backup, you know? And… I actually really like being out slaying with Spike. It’s like… you two, and the doing magicks together, you know? It’s… couple-time. It’s working together, but also mutual recreation. And sometimes it turns into sexy-times. And none of that’s safe if I have to tell him to dive for cover, or I’ll risk vaporizing my lover and mate with some kind of sunshiny, anti-vamp WMD.”

“We’d have to be attacked by a whole bloody lot of the sods to make a spell like that worth it,” Spike put in for the first time. His voice was a low, grating growl as he allowed for the possibilities. “Maybe if you crashed some bloody nest without me, love, as had twenty of the tossers in it, unexpected.”

He had a point. It wouldn’t hurt to have something like that on hand as backup, maybe, if she ever had to dive into a party without him at her back. “Okay, sure. Keep it on the back-burner, then?”

“Keep it on no burner!” Anya broke in, irritation bleeding from her tones. “You can’t just come in and use stuff from the store without paying! Giles has only been gone for a week, and you’re already causing trouble. Jonathan, throw them out.”

Jonathan, who had been sweeping over in the far corner of the store, popped his head up at this and blinked at her like a startled owl. “Excuse me?”

Willow started to smile. “Anya, you’re the fish!”

Tara grinned delightedly, watching her. 

Buffy was totally at sea now. “She’s a fish?”

Jonathan looked as lost as she felt. “A fish because she… No, that doesn’t follow.”

“And you’re the brother!”

“Oookay?”

“In ‘The Cat In The Hat’! ‘You should not be here when our mother is out!’” 

/Oh my God, stop teasing Anya, she’ll call someone to do vengeance on you./

“What are you talking about?” Anya demanded, clearly peeved and getting peevier by the second.

“It’s a book,” Tara soothed, trying to make peace. “There’s this cat. He does all this mischief…”

Spike made a sound that was suspiciously close to a chuckle.

“It's so cute,” Willow put in, all Willow-ish enthusiasm. “He balances a bunch of stuff, including that fish in the bowl! A…and… But don't try it for real when you're six, because then you're not allowed to have fish for five years.”

Buffy winced, remembering what had ended up happening to said fish.

Anya was really tuned up now. “You're referencing literature I have no way to be familiar with. You're trying to make me feel left out, and you're  _ stealing!” _

Willow seemed wholly taken aback at this accusation. “I'm not stealing! I…I'm just taking things without paying for th...” Realization struck her, and she went all defensive, did her slightly head-tilted, backward-step-y Willow-face of stricken horror. “In what twisted dictionary is that  _ stealing?” _

Tara jumped in then. “Willow, maybe we should just pay.”

“If you do,” Jonathan put in from his corner, “All of this will probably just end peacefully. Which, you know, would be the best outcome. I mean, I wouldn’t want to piss her off. She’s kind of scary.”

Willow, though, seemed oddly opposed to paying for whatever they were using. “Anya, Giles would be totally fine with this, and you know it! It’s for the circle… sort of.” At Anya’s pointed glare, “Come on, it'll be fun! You could even join in, and…”

Buffy had had enough. “Wil, if you want to do extracurricular spells using stuff from the store, just pay for it. Anya’s trying to run two businesses, one of them while the owner’s gone. Jonathan’s right. Don’t mess with her, or she’ll get frustrated and call some old colleague to curse you.”

Anya shot her a look that was a mixture of clear frustration for the witches in the room, and relief for her backing. “Thank you, Buffy. Yes. Pay me for the hellebore and go do your magicks somewhere else. You’re chasing off the paying customers!”

Jonathan strode a little closer, broom held forgotten in one hand. “You could use fleabane instead. I’m betting it would give you a much closer correspondence than hellebore, and it would cost you about half as much…”

Anya shot her co-worker a fierce glance, filled with betrayal. “We’re supposed to try to get people to spend  _ more _ money in here, not less!” 

“Oh. Right. I forgot. I figured you just wanted them gone.”

“Well, there is that,” Anya answered, subsiding, and turned back for the counter.

While the girls and Jonathan went through the herb racks, Buffy leaned against the counter, Spike at her back, and addressed the harried shopkeeper. “So, things have been crazy I guess?”

Anya’s lips were compressed into a thin line. “They’d be easier if I didn’t have to repel a bunch of self-important witches who think they’re exempt from paying for supplies in here because they’re in a coven with the owner.”

“You’ll keep ‘em on the straight and narrow. You’re a powerful woman with shares in the company.”

Anya straightened, a stack of receipts in one hand. “Damn right,” she agreed, a new confidence pervading her frame.

Spike snorted, and tugged out the Bic he was currently using, flicked at it. It was a dragon one this time, the cheap illustration peeling off between his fingers. He fiddled with the torn edge of plastic while he spoke. “Could just drain one of ‘em for you, save you the trouble of dealin’ with ‘em.”

Anya eyed him with a faintly-amused expression that seemed both inviting and cynical. “I’d take you up on that, but I doubt Buffy would permit it as a viable solution.”

Xander appeared at their elbows in that moment, eyebrows up. Buffy hadn’t even noticed the bell ringing over the door. “Hey, look at this. All my favorite girls in one place! And why are they fighting?” A harsh look for Spike. “And why is this guy threatening ‘em?”

“He’s offering to do me a favor, Xander. Two of your ‘favorite girls’ are doing horrible things to me.”

“Oh, say it ain’t so!” Xander placed a dramatic palm to his chest and leaned back, looking mock-horrified. “What kind of drama did I miss?” His eyes rose to meet Spike’s. “Did I walk into a Shakespearean tragedy? Or a Kurosawa film?”

Spike rolled his eyes. “Neither. Your bird just wants to stop that lot from nicking herbs from the store while Watcher’s across the Pond, is all.” A faint flicker at the corners of his mouth that might have been the edges of a smirk. “No one’s pulled out any weapons as yet.”

“Oh.” Xander looked confused. “But… they’re in the coven, right? He probably wouldn’t mind if they used a few…”

Anya went into attack-dog mode. “Willow’s  _ stealing _ , Xander! She’s a burglar! And then she tried to use peer-pressure on me to get me to let it go! Next she’s going to try to convince me to switch to lesbianism, and…”

A broad, delighted smile broke out on Xander’s face. “Oh, honey. That’d never happen.”

“Oh, really? Why? I’ve read about peer-pressure. That’s how it works. People push you into trying a gateway-drug, like spellwork, and then…”

“And then they try to wean you off of men and drag you over to the wild-side of girls, girls, girls? Sweetie, you like d… man-parts way too much to do more than the occasional dabbling…” He blushed, but pushed on, still grinning. “Which, you’ve already told me you’ve tried in the past, and you got bored. So if you’ve already tried it, how can anyone peer-pressure you into swinging that way permanently? You can’t gateway-drug someone into something they’ve already inoculated themselves against.”   
Anya considered that, then looked abruptly satisfied. “Oh. Well, okay, then.”

Willow was rolling her eyes over there by the herb-boxes. “And I’m such a burglar. The cunning, broad daylight, in front of everyone burglar. Besides; the spell we were gonna do was to help Buffy, which I’m sure Giles would approve it if he knew…”

“We’ve already been over this, Red,” Spike broke in. “Spell’s no help unless it’s a right emergency, so there’s no rush, yeah? And besides…” And here he shoved his tattered lighter back into his breast pocket and shot a glance at Buffy, “think the Slayer’d rather you focus your witchly attentions on spells as might help us fight our newest big bad, rather than on ways to take out the standard, wet-behind-the-ears fledge, innit?”

“Definitely,” Buffy agreed. With feeling. And, biting her lip, she let out a breath to pin her oldest friend with a look. “Also, it’s probably bad juju to try to put Xan in the middle of this. He’s dating Anya—or, sort of. Whatever—and you two have been besties since kindergarten. It’s completely unfair and you can’t do that to him. So, stop it, Wil.”

Xander, who had been edging behind Tara as if preparing to use her as a human shield, shot Buffy a humbly grateful look.

Willow sighed and, walking up to the counter, set a mortar and pestle there, with maybe a little too much force. Something herbal poofed out of it and wafted over the register.

Which vanished.

Anya, predictably, exploded into a freakout. “What did you  _ do?  _ The cash register! The  _ cash! _ Willow…”

Willow went from pissy to apologetic and helpful in an instant. “Oops! I'll fix it, I'll fix it!  _ Recursat _ .”

The register, thank goodness,  _ poofed _ back into existence. Sort of. The receipt roll was dangling out of it in a huge, long curl like it had been toyed with by a giant kitten playing with a ball of yarn. It had smoke coming from it, and what the hell evil dimension had she sent it to?

“There!” Willow announced, tentatively triumphant to hide the defensive. “Good as… new.”

“The money! Did you hurt the money?” Anya banged the drawer open… and coughed as more smoke poured out of the slot. “Xander, look! Buffy! She endangered the money!”

Buffy sighed. “Wil, maybe you should go do spells somewhere else for a while?”

Willow folded like a towel, and turned on her full-on misery-face. “I didn’t mean to…”

/Oh, man./ “I know it. I don’t even think it’s your fault. I think maybe just being on the hellmouth makes the magicks do kerflooey things you don’t plan.”

Willow exhaled heavily and turned to Tara. “Do you think that’s what it is, baby? That maybe it’s not just me when things keep going wrong all the time?”

Tara drew closer, tucked her arm in her girlfriend’s elbow. “Yeah, I think that could be it, Sweetheart. Why don’t we go somewhere a little less populated and practice some meditations first, to get centered before we do any more spells. Do it right. Draw a full circle, pull out the salt...”

“O…okay.” She threw over her shoulder as they left, “That spell would have been useful, though, right Buffy?”

Buffy gave in and nodded. “Yeah. In an anti-vampire apocalypse, if we were completely swarmed under by thousands of vamps… yeah, Wil. That one would seriously come in handy. Like bringing in a little portable sun.”

“I thought so.” Willow looked seriously vindicated as they departed. 

“Don’t forget,” Buffy called after them, “Thanksgiving. My house. Tomorrow night!”

“Of course!” The bell rang. The door fell closed.

“Ookaaay-then,” Xander put in as the girls left, “that was tense.”

“Why do they think they should be able to use the inventory for free, Xander?” Anya demanded. She lifted the curl of receipt paper, still lightly smoking, and glared at it as if it had personally offended her. “I don’t understand their logic.”

Xander sighed and settled himself on a stool on the other side of the counter. “Ahn, helping Buffy was always at the top of the list, for years. The idea that commerce should take precedence is really not on Wil’s radar.”

“But… this is a  _ store _ . An economic enterprise. I can understand that mentality when you were all hanging out in a lending library, but here we are working to make money! It isn’t a free resource for funding Slayer-related research! Surely she must realize the difference!”

Jonathan approached, diffident as always, and laid one hand on the counter. “I’m a newcomer to the group, but I’ve noticed a difference in approaches between you and the rest, Anya, which I think might shed some light on this little bone of contention.”

Anya surprised Buffy by staring at her colleague with something like hope. “Please. Enlighten me, little man. You’re a very quiet and observant creature, and when you do speak, I find your sentiments worthy of deep examination.”

Jonathan smiled, sweet and startled, but broadening with pleasure. “You, Anya, value money because it’s a way to keep score, show that you’ve integrated into the system. That you can be valued yourself within that system; a human system that cast you out a thousand-plus years ago. You eschewed that system for that entire thousand years and lived outside of it, because the people who cling to it devalued you. You took your vengeance on them without qualm, over and over again, but they never stopped hurting you, or each other, and you never seemed to make a dent when you practiced your vengeance to show them Justice. And now you’ve been thrust back into their system, but you’re still outside, looking in. So if you have to be here, with them, if you have to understand them, then you will best them at their own game, and show them that you can use their own system against them to win out, be better than them, and end up at the top of the food chain. Because you’ll never be powerless again inside the machine that harmed you the first time around.”

Anya stared at him in clear surprise. Buffy, though, felt nothing short of awed amazement for Jonathan’s clear, sure enunciation of something she had never understood. Because… wow. It made complete sense, and what the hell?

Sometimes she kind of thought Jonathan Levinson was some kind of alien, when he came out with stuff like this.

“Willow,” Jonathan went on quietly, “thinks you like money better than people. She believes that you only like things that can be exchanged for goods and services. That you’re all about the practical. But that’s not it at all. You’re protecting yourself, because to see people as individuals rather than as a means to an end would be to recognize their problems, their individual struggles… and then you’d have to question the vengeance you’ve done on so many of them over the course of ten centuries.”

Behind her, Buffy felt Spike jerk in empathetic recognition. Turned her gaze back to the woman in question, and saw it. The flinch, the way her eyes darted away. And Buffy knew, in that instant, that Anya had lied last winter. That she still had that demon soul; knew it by the way the woman paled behind the register, looking ashen and shaken. 

It was something the ex-vengeance demon and her vampire had in common. To see them all as people would be to regret… and neither of them could live with that kind of remorse and survive.

“Willow, though, will never understand that about you,” Jonathan went on softly, “because to her, people and their needs will always come first. She doesn’t care about commerce, or the one-upmanship of making money, or any of the things you care about. She sees a resource for helping the people she loves to survive the world we live in, and she doesn’t see why she shouldn’t use it to make that world easier. Everything in her mind is about making things easier to deal with, because everything is too hard and too loud and too bright and too dangerous. She just wants the noise to stop so she can focus on the beautiful and the pretty and the hugs and the smiles, and forget that she has danger and darkness inside of herself. Because every time someone she loves is threatened, she can feel that power boiling up, ready to tear the world apart to save everyone, and it scares her. Because we’re on a hellmouth, and she doesn’t know if she can control it if it gets away from her.”

Buffy was completely taken aback now. How did Jonathan know so much about her friends; the people she had known for years? He had only been a part of the group for a few months! 

What even?

Her eyes darted of their own accord to Xander’s, seeking acknowledgment. Did he believe the quietly observant young man was correct?

Xander was watching Jonathan with an odd expression on his face, pulling at his lower lip and frowning. He looked… not unconvinced, but… concerned. Definitely concerned; like he had been hit between the eyes with something unexpected, heavy, and potently worrying.

Anya, though, was nodding as if this all made perfect sense. “Well, clearly the girl has a vast well of untapped Dark Magicks power inside her, boiling just beneath the surface. Anyone with half a nose could smell it a mile off. I can see why she’d be afraid something might set it off. She plays the unassuming, sweet little girl well enough, but it’s all a front. Which is why I don’t trust her. I mean, who  _ does _ that? Who pretends to be just a cute little witch when they’re really, all too obviously, a massive Dark Power lying in wait? Why doesn’t she just… let loose and get it over with?”

Spike broke in then, sounding at his wits’ end with impatience. “Oh, for Chrissake, Vengeance, you know why. The chit’s never let loose before. It’s like losin’ your soddin’ virginity, innit? She’s no idea of her own power or how to contain it if she ever once cut loose. She’s terrified of it. And rightly so, I’d think, considerin’.”

“Well, it’s annoying. It’s like she’s walking around lying to everyone. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. She makes me edgy.”

Buffy held up one hand, begging the indulgence of an explanation. “Excuse me. Hold up. Willow’s a massive  _ what _ , now?”

Spike turned his eyes to hers, surprised. “A great bloody Dark sodding Power, lyin’ in wait, if she ever popped her bleedin’ cork an’ got brassed enough to let loose. Surely you’ve felt it, love.” Off her blank look, “Oh, bloody hell. Vengeance is right. The girl fair reeks of power. It’s like walking through a great soddin’ fog, bein’ around her. Makes every damned hair on me body stand on end sometimes; ‘specially when that lot are doin’ spells in Watcher’s flat.”

Buffy joined Xander in staring at him in amazement. “You… can smell it…” Buffy echoed, flummoxed.

Spike sounded amazed at her as he replied, and eyed her down his nose like she was some kind of new, half-blind species of mole. “Yeah, I can bloody well smell it on her! I’m surprised you don’t feel it every time you walk by her, Slayer. She fair rings with it.”

Stung, Buffy automatically rolled her eyes. “She’s  _ human _ , Spike,” she reminded her mate.

“Oh. Yeah. Well, there’s that.” He sounded nonplussed by this aide-mémoire.

“Wait,” Xander put in, still bewildered, “so you’re saying that…”

“Willow could wipe us all out with a word if she ever got pissed off?” Jonathan interrupted mildly, and turned with his broom to head toward the back. “Yeah. Way. Anya, I’m gonna go down to the basement to get more receipt tape, alright?”

“Yeah. Thank you, Jonathan.”

“No problem.”

He departed toward the basement door, leaving Buffy and Xander to stare at each other in shock, while the two demons-on-hiatus stood next to them, leisurely taking in the remains of the day as if nothing momentous whatsoever had occurred.

***

They were shopping for the turkey and whatever other Thanksgiving-y odds and ends Mom needed to make dinner on Thursday when Anya called. Spike eyed Buffy with interest as she peered at the phone, blinking in startlement as the ex-demon’s name flickered on the green-and-black screen. 

She honestly couldn’t recall the last time Anya had called her. Well, except for back when Mom was woozy that one time at the gallery, and oh, god, was Mom okay?   
“You gonna answer it, pet?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Hitting ‘send’, Buffy lifted the flip-phone to her ear. “Yeah. Anya, what’s u…”

‘Buffy, get over here quick. I came in to grab my pocketbook—I’d left it behind the counter—and that insane witch was in here using the herbs…’

‘I kept a list!’ Willow’s voice broke in, half-screech. ‘I said I’d pay for…’

An enormous crash resounded over the line.

‘She accidentally conjured a troll. He smashed some of my merchandise… oh. And now he’s gone.’

“Wait… what?” Buffy was having a hard time keeping up.

‘A  _ troll _ , Buffy,’ Anya repeated briskly, as if she were speaking to a toddler with attention deficit issues. ‘One with terrible manners and bad breath and probably a terrible foot-fungus. Also, I know for a fact he has an awful temper. He’s out terrorizing downtown Sunnydale right at this very moment…’

‘What, do you know him personally or something?’ Willow demanded from somewhere distant, almost out of range of the mic. 

‘I’d keep an eye out for smashed windows and running, screaming people,’ Anya went on, calmly ignoring Willow’s interjection. ‘If I know h… trolls, he’ll probably head to somewhere they serve beer. Your best bet is a bar.’ And the phone’s connection went dead.

Buffy sighed and folded up the phone, then nodded to their half-filled cart. “Guess Thanksgiving shopping’s gonna have to wait.”

Spike grinned and gave the quarter-filled cart a hefty shove. It sailed smartly off down the meat aisle like it had been motorized. Shocked shoppers dove out of the way as it passed, exclaiming and glaring at the dangerous patron in the leather jacket. Buffy exhaled in disappointment as the squeaking, laden wagon swung off-enter to careen into a tall rack of misplaced bread products, where it quivered to an abrupt stop, rattling. Quite a number of bystanders shouted angry epithets. A mob began to coalesce.

Spike sneered back at the endangered shoppers and gave them serious vamp-eye, along with a complimentary two-finger salute. Their collective rage subsided abruptly and they dispersed, darting hunted glances in their general direction. 

“Nice. Real adult of you.” Buffy so didn’t have time for Spike-antics. 

“Never said I was real adult.” He pulled out a cigarette and shoved it between his lips, probably in celebration of freedom from the domestic task of shopping for a holiday dinner. “So. Troll-hunting, is it?”

“Don’t light that in here. And c’mon.” Grabbing his sleeve, she dragged her recalcitrant mate through the cereal aisle and towards the doors. /Note to self to shop on my own next time./ There were some domesticated tasks for which a Spike was just simply not at all suited. 

He was mostly housebroken these days, but she had probably been pushing it, there.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
So, next week... Triangle, the established relationship version. Among other things.   



	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. The rest of "Triangle" commences... with a twist or two. Because established relationship, and different Xanya-ness, and some slight differences in the Willow-the-witch storyline. Also, of course, I've pirated dialogue from the episode. 
> 
> Hopefully I pulled this off fairly well. Thanks as always to wolf_shadoe for her general amazingness!!!

With the help of Spike’s well-tuned sniffer, they tracked the troll with swift ease. Anya was right. The creep had headed straight for the Bronze; do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Granted, he had stopped a few times along the way to smash things like dumpsters and to knock down lampposts, because why not? /I guess file troll under ‘destruct-o-guy’?/ 

By the time they got to the club, said destruct-o-guy was tearing the place up pretty good, yelling the whole time about wanting “stronger ale and babies”, which didn’t sound all that promising.

“What, d’ya think if we give him a few babies to eat, he’ll leave off?” Spike inquired, watching the ongoing, mild destruction from the doorway.

A fratboy-looking dude flew by to bounce off of the bar, fell behind it with a moan. Buffy shot her vampire a  _ look _ .

“No? Didn’t think so.” With a sigh, he nodded and crouched down into battle stance. “You make everything so bloody difficult, Slayer.” Then, striding further into the madness, he called out to the troll like an insane idiot, because that was what she loved about him, and it made up for his earlier comment. Mostly. Almost. “Oi! Troll! Hear you’re hungry?”

The troll swung around to face them. Buffy got an impression that mostly consisted of ‘large’. As in, about seven feet tall, large. Otherwise, there was ‘olive green’, ‘russet-headed’, and ‘covered in hides’.

Basically, they were about to fight that guy from the trailers for that new Dreamworks movie about the ogre. Except this one had horns and a huge hammer, which he was using to smash basically everything in sight. Though, in the current instant he had paused hostilities against all objects animate and inanimate to focus his squinty gaze on Spike. “Vampire! Greetings! Do you wish to join in the merriment and debauchery? I have found ale, though it is weak!”

“Not much for ale myself,” Spike answered, striding in past huddles of terrified villagers… um, club-goers. “More of a whiskey man myself.” A tilt of the head as he studied the troll. “The beer is pretty weak here, I’ll give you that. But they do a hell of an onion blossom. Ever had one of those?”

The troll roared irritation. “You cannot appease me, tiny vampire! I want babies!”

Spike turned to Buffy with a shrug. “Well, I tried. Go to, love.”

He was sweet for giving a shot to the whole demon-bonding thing. Buffy patted his shoulder as she passed. “Thanks for trying, honey.”

“No charge.”

Troll-boy had seized a keg off of a nearby cart in the interim and was ignoring them in favor of chugging the entire thing as if it were a large mug. Just, wow. “Hey!” Buffy called. “You’re gonna have to pay for that, you know.” And for lack of anything better, she picked up a piece of splintered bar, hefted it from one hand to the other. It was brittle, but better than no weapon at all. /Why does this stuff always happen when I’m wandering around unarmed?/

Probably the answer to that was to never leave the house or dorm without a sword or something. Maybe instead of trying to make pointless vamp-frying spells, Wil could focus on making her a weapons-cloaking one or something instead. That way, when crap like this happened she could be prepared.

Speak of the devil. Anya and Wil came barreling into the Bronze right then, Willow cradling a massive book in her arms. “Buffy!” Willow shouted as they entered. “I have a counterspell…”

“Great. Because I don’t have anything strong enough to fight a guy with a hammer like that.”

“Looks like it would hurt,” Spike agreed. By his posture, he didn’t want to volunteer to step up first for the honors. Buffy didn’t blame him. She didn’t much want to feel the effects of a blunt-force weapon like that one herself; especially wielded by a monster as huge as this guy.

“More ale!” the troll bellowed. “And much stronger!”

Anya’s eyes darted over to one side, and she made a concerned noise, vanished briefly, came up again with Xander. “What are you  _ doing _ here? There’s a troll!”

“Noticed that,” Xander answered, looking a little green around the gills. “The guy’s really hung up on eating babies, which… as a lifestyle choice, is ew.”

Anya gave an exasperated sigh. “He shouldn’t even be here! Willow stole a bunch of ingredients and released him from a purple crystal…”

“For the last  _ time _ , I wasn’t  _ stealing!  _ I was gonna pay you back! I kept a list and  _ everything!” _

Buffy swung on Willow. “If you did this, you can undo it, right?”

“It wasn’t even… It was both of… I mean, Anya was…” Babbling, almost, Willow backpedaled ferociously. “It’s complicated, okay? She walked in right at the worst possible second and started yelling at me, and broke my concentration, and…”

“Serves you right! Why were you even in there, after hours…”

Tara burst in right then, eyes wide. “Willow, where were…  _ Oh!”  _ Then, with a heavy sigh, “I thought we agreed to wait before you tried to do the… with the hellebore.” She sounded super disappointed.

“Oh, baby, I’m sorry. I just really wanted to see if I even  _ could _ …”

“Look,” Anya interrupted, sounding frustrated half out of her mind. “None of that even matters right now. “Do the spell, Willow! Send him back! He’s destroying this business establishment and snacking on their customers. It’s very bad form.”

“Oh, because people aren’t even people to you, they’re just, like, receptacles of money. They’re like this symbol of the goods and services you can get out of them, and you can’t exchange them directly. They’re only useful to you if they render cash to you in nice…”

“Willow!” Buffy shouted, and dove in abruptly, a tuck-and-roll maneuver. The troll had just swung on a whole group of unsuspecting college guys she thought she vaguely recognized from Phi Beta Phi who were gathered in a scared gaggle down by the uprights that held up the balcony. They had probably come down here to pick up underaged high school girls, which was gross, but right now that was the least of her worries. They were going to end up with internal injuries if they stepped up to protect the girls they were with from this troll-thing.

Coming out of her roll just under the arm wielding the hammer, Buffy caught the gargantuan, green wrist, forestalling the blow. “Run!” she directed, and the gaggle broke. Then she smiled sweetly up at the troll. “Hi. I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced yet. Slayer, troll. Troll, Slayer. How’s your day so far? Had a nice summoning? I hear the beer is better where you’re from… which, I agree. The beer here is pretty lame. I know where there’s better brew…”

The troll goggled at her for a moment, then threw back his bearded head and laughed heartily. “A Slayer. A puny Slayer, come to challenge the mighty Olaf! Well and good. Let us battle, and then drink together, little one! Good, good!” And, jerking his massive, smelly arm away, he twisted it outward and swung, hard, at a wide, oblique angle.

Buffy ducked, rolled again. The enormous hammer  _ whooshed _ over her head, sounding like a jet-plane coming in for a landing. 

“Wow,” Buffy informed him, blinking prettily, “that’s a hell of a tool you’ve got there, Olaf.”

His grin broadened. “You should see the other, little female warrior. You would be mightily impressed.”

From over on the far side of the room, a short, sharp bark of disdain from Anya. It caught Olaf’s attention, dragged it away from the beginnings of an impromptu battle. And then everything changed.

“Anyanka?” the troll demanded, sounding amazed. “I did not recognize you in the shop, but this was you, wasn’t it?” And suddenly he was pointing with his huge hammer, all accusatory distress. “You have done this! And now you have asked this witch to put an end to all my fun; just like you always did when we were dating!”

Buffy wasn’t alone in swiveling to stare at Anya in amazement. Xander, though, was the first to speak up. “You  _ dated _ him?”

“You dated a _ troll?” _ Willow put in, amazed. “That’s low even for  _ your _ standards!”

“Well, he wasn’t a troll, then,” Anya defended. “You know, he was just a big, dumb guy. And, hey! I just realized you insulted me!”

“Ladies, ladies…”

“For your  _ information _ , he cheated on me! So I made him into a troll, which by the way is…” A little pause, and she flushed in what looked like embarrassed-but-proud reminiscence. “…How I got the job. As a vengeance demon.”

Buffy darted away from the huge monster as he roared in fury and smashed his hammer into the upright holding up the balcony. The upper floor of the Bronze sagged, missing one of its five main supports. Upstairs patrons who had thought themselves safe from the carnage began to shriek and flee down the stairs, making for the front door.

/Oh, man/ Buffy mourned as she dodged away, out from under the endangered mezzanine, to rejoin the Scooby group. /Time to come up with a faster solution to the current crisis. And also, if Anya knows this guy, maybe…/

“I did not cheat!” Olaf exclaimed, hammer held high. “Not in my heart!”

“That’s what they all say,” Spike interjected into Buffy’s ear. 

“It was only one wench! And I… I had had a great deal of mead! Next thing I know, I’m a troll.”

So far, his excuses really didn’t wash. Buffy was kind of with Anya, here.

“Oh, you did this, Anyanka. You will die for this!” And, brandishing the hammer high, Olaf stalked toward them, the light of violence in his piggy little eyes.

“But you seem to enjoy the… being a troll,” Xander pointed out, half-cowering back and half shooting for calm logic in that way that always amazed Buffy. Normal guy, no powers, standing in the face of death and supernatural destruction and just, like, arguing semantics with demons. Like ya do, when you were totally used to this stuff.

Olaf paused in his strides. It seemed as if he could not walk and engage his brain to conversate all at the same time. “I adjusted,” he allowed, puzzling it out. And his face suffused once more with rage. “And then what happened? Witches! Filthy, dirty, disgusting witches. They trapped me! I was imprisoned in that crystal for centuries! Oh, a curse on all witches! All must die!” And he started forward again, brandishing his giant smashy-thing.

“Okay, that’s not promising.” Turning to Willow, Buffy nodded at the book. “Do whatever, Wil, and hurry.”

“Uh, right. “Let, uh, the conjuring be undone. Return the beast to native form.”

Nothing. Well, except for threats. “Witch, you must stop!” The Bronze’s service-counter went kaput, a big hammer-hole right through the middle of it. 

It was kindling. Too small even to use any pieces for vamp-stakeage. Wow, that thing packed a wallop.

“Keep it far from us and ours as long as my voice shall sound,” Wil went on, hurriedly now. Her eyes darted up from the book and down again, anxiety filling her frame. 

Tara touched her hand, covering it on the book’s edge. Lending power.

Olaf paused briefly. Glanced up and down his stinky body. When nothing happened, he roared with laughter and came on. “It did not work, insignificant witch!”

They backed off, Buffy bumping into Spike as they went. Willow began to flip pages frantically. Spike murmured into Buffy’s ear, “What do you think, Slayer? You go right, I go left? Keep the bugger busy? Give time at least for the rest of the civilians to escape.”

“Okay, wait! Um, ‘Let the conjuring…’”

No time to see if anything would happen with the latest spell-age. The troll was on them. With a swift nod to Spike to indicate agreement, Buffy darted to the right and kicked the monster hard in the chest, then rolled away as Spike drove in from the left to keep him off balance with a blow to the side of the head with some piece of debris he’d picked up from somewhere. 

The debris broke, of course, but the blow kept the troll’s hammer off of Buffy. By the time Olaf was reorienting on Spike, Buffy had come back in with another few kicks and punches to keep the bastard off of her guy. And so it went. 

This was the sort of thing they were used to, and they employed the system well in this case. It always worked best against a foe who relied overly on brute strength, who was a bit slow in either body or mind. 

Buffy kind of had the feeling that this guy checked all three of those categories. He was no blonde-bitch big bad, for sure. /No strategery here. Just hit hard and back off till he gets too confused or too bored to hang around, and then…/

Well, maybe they could try to get that stupid hammer off of his hands. That might even things up a little… /Oh hell no!/

Maybe he was smarter than he looked, combat-wise. He’d just turned away from her, taking a hit on the side of his head without blinking, to catch an unprepared Spike broadside with one wide-swinging arm. Buffy watched her vampire go flying across the room. 

“Unacceptable,” she told troll-boy firmly, and grabbed him by the upper arm before he could turn back, to slam him face-first onto the nearest pool table. “Listen, dumbass,” she went on, grappling with him for his stupid hammer, “I don’t put up with this kind of disruption in my town. You’re… uncouth, and loud, and… And I don’t like baby-eaters… and you just smacked my boyfriend across the room. That’s totally uncalled-for!”

Olaf straightened, knocking her aside, and gave her a shove that had a pretty massive amount of force behind it. She found herself doing a little flying as well, and dammit, what was with the whole soaring through the air trend she had going lately when she was in combat with unexpected foes?

Granted, she landed on top of Spike, who was just then climbing to his feet, but that was also kind of a trend right now, and dammit, this was starting to get old.

Hands familiarly on her waist, Spike helped her to her feet. “How about we save the canoodling for later, pet?” he murmured, and gave her earlobe a swift nip. “First we’ve got to send this bastard back to wherever the hell he came from.”

Good plan, since Olaf seemed inclined to vent his spleen by smashing everything in sight. Right now that included knocking the entire mezzanine down, one pillar at a time, which…

Buffy winced. Luckily, most of the people who had been up there had already fled, but there were a few who, probably frozen in terror, had remained behind. When the whole stupid thing crashed down to ground-level, they rolled off in a cacophony of screaming and broken limbs and bleeding scalps; the ones who didn’t just fly right off dangling off the falling railing before they dropped feet-first to break their legs in the fall like dopes. 

/Great/ Buffy thought as she covered her head to avoid getting brained by falling debris. /I just love human casualties…/

A wooden strut of some kind caught her sideways, whacking her across the belly to knock her down. Pinned beneath it, she fought for breath, and cast her eyes about her, searching for Spike. He didn’t feel like he was in any distress, which meant he’d be there in seconds to lift the beam off of her. /Ugh. It makes everything so much less fun, trying to explain to the authorities when a bunch of random people get hurt…/ She gave the thing pinning her a shove but it was pretty heavy and she didn’t have much leverage, lying on her back this way. 

And then Spike was at her side, helping her to lift it away, eyes azure and worried on hers. She shook her head as she scrambled out from under it, caught his hand to rise, let her expression telegraph her status to him. No broken ribs. All good.

He nodded, swung away to assess the situation with her.

Ugh. The place was a disaster. /Maybe I can call this in to Detective Waller, directly. ‘How are you with trolls, Waller? Oh, what are they like? Big, green, bad-tempered…’/

Most of the remaining population of the Bronze were streaming out the doors by now; all the uninjured ones, anyway. Why they hadn’t all left long since was beyond Buffy’s comprehension. A whole bunch of idiot people in this town, seriously. That, or they were, like, mentally immune, after stuff like the ceremony that whackjob Luke had done in here, and just, general mayhem on a regular basis.

Her casing of the place revealed one very particular detail. Troll-boy had vanished. 

“Anya! Willow! Where is he?”

“Gone,” Wil bit off briskly, frowning, then shot a worried-accusing glance at Anya.

“Magic Box,” Anya answered, grabbed Xander’s sleeve, and made for the door. 

Towed in their wake, Xander stumbled into their jetstream and followed. Tara shot Buffy a helpless look, darted her gaze after them, then turned back to the scene of destruction and waded in to offer triage to the wounded, because she was awesome like that.

“Hopefully they’ll find a spell that’ll actually stop him,” Buffy muttered grimly as she surveyed the damage.

“I can go sniff him out, Slayer,” Spike murmured, head tilted. “See which way he headed.” He sounded way distracted.

“Yeah.” Sighing heavily, Buffy tilted her neck to work out the impact kinks. Having part of a building fall on you was never fun. “Yeah, I guess we should go do that…” She shook her head grimly. “In a sec.” Moving over to where Tara was trying mightily but failing to lift some debris off of an injured guy, she shoved her way into the fray and helped raise the beam. The groaning fratboy slithered out from under the structural damage and moved to lean back against the tattered couch arm.

Spike had left her side and… /Oh. Oh, man./ He was crouched over an injured woman, sliding something behind her head to support her while he helped her to get into a more comfortable half-sitting position. 

The woman had blood all over her face from a scalp wound. Spike’s expression was tight, but he had it under control, and  _ god _ , Buffy loved that vampire. Loved him more than life. 

“Hey,” she told him as she approached, and touched his shoulder. “You don’t have to do this. Tara and I can… I mean, you can, you know, go call Officer Waller or something and then go sniff out his trail while we…” She waved her hand around the room, a vague gesture indicating the many blood-spattered victims of the crash-landing.

Spike shrugged one-shouldered. “You need more hands than that. Lot of people injured in here. Be a while till the paramedics show up, after you call.”

Buffy couldn’t even imagine what the room smelled like for him right now; and this was a relatively well-fed vampire. /Thank god for that; thank god this is now and not last month, when you were still struggling to stay fed, or this would’ve been torture for you, helping with this./ Flipping open her phone to get that show on the road, she discharged him of duty while dialing 911. “You still don’t have to.”

“Know that, Slayer. I’m alright. And anyway, need my help, innit?”   
  
‘Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?’

Her eyes were warm on his. “Always,” she mouthed, then turned her attention to the call. “Could we get a few ambulances out to the Bronze? Something attacked a bunch of people here and knocked down the balcony thing. A bunch of people are pinned down with debris or injured…”

After this call, she’d call Waller directly. She didn’t know how the Sunnydale police drew straws for stuff like this, but she thought as a professional courtesy she’d let the woman know about all this anyway, in case she wanted to get herself assigned.

***

They headed away from the Bronze as the first EMS units arrived, patrol cars right behind them. Buffy nodded at Waller as she and Spike rounded the corner, got a sober nod back. Then, slipping her hand into his, she shot a quick glance at Tara. “What kind of luck do you think they’re having with finding a spell to stop that thing?”

Tara made a doubting sort of face. “I mean… It would have to be pretty specific to trolls, and to him, since he was turned into a troll by Anya way back when, and…” She trailed off, sounding worried.

/That’s what I was afraid of./ Buffy turned her attention to her guy. “Can you smell him?”

Spike pulled a disgusted face. “Bloke stinks like an open sewer, pet. Smell him a mile off, yeah? He’s rampagin’ about breakin’ everything he sees, probably off lookin’ for babies. Luckily he doesn’t seem to know where they keep ‘em these days, and he’s not like to find fresh virgins about this town…” The dig earned him an elbow to the ribs. “So he’ll most likely end in going after those two, since they’re the greatest threat to his continued freedom.”

“Yay. Magic Box it is, then.” They separated to step into the car, nodding Tara into the back seat. She slid in without a word, looking anxious; as well she might, considering a massive, ill-tempered troll was after her girlfriend. Buffy was worried about Willow and Anya as well… but she had a whole other thing on her mind, too. Something more pertinent to the moment. “Hey.”

The car on, Spike spared her a glance as he guided it around a dumpster and out onto the main drag. “Yeah, pet?”

“I know how hard that must’ve been for you. And I want you to know I’m way touched, and proud of you, and grateful. And you’re so gonna get a huge, nice, intimate,  _ personalized _ reward once this is all over.”

A slow grin spread across Spike’s cheek. He hit the gas, peeling out for downtown. “Didn’t do it to get rewarded, love.”

“I know that. But still.”

“Won’t say no to a little extra lovin’ on the side, though.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

From the back seat, Tara piped in with a, “You two need a moment alone?”

Buffy smiled at her guy and touched his hand. “No, I think we’re good till at least after we deal with this ogre.”

“Troll, pet. Ogres are a lot hairier. And wider.”

“Oh. Good to know. Don’t want to insult Olaf by calling him thick.”

“Oh, he’s bloody well thick, love. Never met such a dull-brained fool of a demon…”

“My kind of thick, honey, not yours. Thick-bodied, not thick-witted.”

Spike grunted. “Oh. Right. Well… he lumbers a bit. Wouldn’t call him svelte, exactly.”

“He packs a punch, though.”

“Yeah. Got to get that soddin’ hammer away from him.” Frowning, he swung the shuddering old car expertly around a sharp corner. “We need some bleedin’ weapons. Comin’ at this prat empty-handed’s like to do us in.”

“Oh!” Buffy half-turned to Tara, looked at her over the seat. “I keep forgetting! Can the circle, like, do some kind of invisibility spell on our weapons? You know, so we can carry them around cloaked or whatever, all the time? I don’t want to end up in this situation again, where we’re caught with our pants down and don’t have anything to use against some mischief-maker, because all the swords are at home.”

“Oh!” Tara nodded, looking thoughtful. “Yeah, we should be able to do that, no problem. I mean, we’d have to cast the circle around the whole pile of weapons, but…”

“Done. No problem. Spike, yours too?”

A brief pause. “One issue. How the bloody hell would  _ we _ see ‘em to mount up, Slayer?”

“Oh.” She hadn’t thought of that, exactly. “Um…”

“We’d have to make it something you could turn off and on…” Tara sounded caught up in the puzzle of it. “We’ll figure it out, Buffy. I don’t know why we haven’t thought of it already.”

/Because you guys aren’t on the front lines./ But she didn’t say it out loud. It wouldn’t be nice to rub the Scoobies’ noses in the reality of things.

Anyway, they were pulling up behind the Magic Box right at that moment. Conversation postponed.

Voices could be heard ranting away inside as they entered; echoing so loudly they could be heard all the way here in the back room. “You think I’m hurting Xander? Or that I will? You’re closer to being a vengeance demon than I am now. Hoffy offered you my old job. And you don’t like men. At least I like to sleep with them. And… you might try to take Xander away from me! You had the thing once with him, where you broke up him and Cordelia…”

Okay, what even. Were they fighting over Xander? Really? Buffy glanced back at Tara, who, luckily, was rolling her eyes at Anya’s insecure rant. 

Willow kicked in then. “Oh, c’mon; as if that’s ever gonna happen again! That was such a one-time thing. It only happened because he couldn’t have me, because I was suddenly unavailable. And we so completely got that out of our systems a long time ago. I don’t even think of him that way anymore. He’s my best friend, aside from Buffy, and obviously Tara. And besides; why should you care if we did? You’re always pushing him away, telling him to sleep with other people…”

“Oh my God,” Buffy whispered, and turned back for the door. The troll obviously wasn’t here, and considering the ridiculousness of the current conversation, she didn’t particularly want to be here either.

Didn’t they both know that there was exactly zero contest here? That they were fighting over nothing?

“Okay, but even if you don’t want him, you don’t want anyone else to have him!” Anya shot back. “Especially me! You’re always doing everything you can to point out how I’m this huge outsider. And you’ve known him since you were squalling infants together. You'll always know him better than I do. You could sweep in and… And poison his mind against me!”

/Oh, wow./

There was a short, probably stunned silence from the other side of the door, and who knew Anya was so insecure about her relationship with Xander? “Did you know,” Buffy began in Tara’s direction, but never got to finish.

“You’re  _ insane!” _ Willow was lashing back. “I’m not gonna take him away—I mean, hello;  _ gay _ now!—and I’m not gonna hurt him! No one  _ could _ take him away! He’s completely in love with you! You’re the one who’s hurting  _ him _ with this whole, ‘we can see other people, I’m gonna go sleep with this other demon’ thing you have going on…”

/Oh, c’mon, you guys, this is so not the time for…/

“That’s not hurting him! That’s just practical, ethical polyamory, where we both agree that we’re free to…”

_“You!_ _You_ agree! _He_ never agreed to it!”

“That’s all  _ you _ know! He  _ did! _ He agreed right in front of me!  _ You _ weren’t there!”

“Oh my  _ God _ , Anya, don’t you get that that doesn’t even  _ count? _ And it  _ shouldn’t! _ After what he did last year, and all the stuff you found out about, he would’ve agreed to  _ anything _ just to keep you! But that doesn’t mean he’s  _ okay _ with it!”

“I… That doesn’t make any… If he ever wanted to renegotiate…”

There was a loud, vicious  _ crash _ on the other side of the store; vast enough to make Buffy jump. Out of her periphery she saw Tara jump even higher. Even Spike started a little. 

“I knew it. You two, performing more spells. I could be out pillaging, devouring babies, making merry with the local virgins; but instead I had to come all the way back here to kill you!”

Olaf had arrived. Buffy was almost grateful, since Troll, stage center, meant an end to that ludicrous debate going on in there. 

Making for the inside door, Buffy put on the speed when she heard another crash. And her guts did a terrified dance when she heard Xander’s lone, brave human voice echo through the space. “No, get away from them!”

“I will get away from them, after I kill them.”

Man, that troll a real sweetheart, wasn’t he?

Buffy wrenched the door open, to the tune of Xander staunchly informing the troll, “You are not touching these women.”

There was a vast crashing as Buffy rounded the corner and burst through the short hall. She ran into the main store, to find herself face to face with a disaster. 

The central space was already kind of smashed up. Displays laying on their sides, placards and books scattered on the floor, broken statuettes, smashed… Xander was picking himself up from a pile of… stuff… and then he planted himself in front of the counter where Wil and Anya were huddled, feverishly doing something spell-worky that involved an open book, a cauldron, and a pile of herbs. /Oh my God, Xander, don’t try to take that thing on on your own! You idiot!/ 

Buffy groaned inwardly when the troll smacked her friend—albeit lightly—across the face with that massive midlife crisis of a hammer. 

With another crash, Xander flew across the room and smacked into a wall. 

And to Buffy’s horror, struggled back to his feet.

/Oh my God, Xan, stay  _ down _ ./

“Ah, you wish for more? Admirable!” Before Buffy, still halfway across the room, could move to stop him he’d grabbed Xan by his collar, forestalling another swing, and slung him around to slide him across the floor. Xander skidded about fifteen feet, headfirst into a display case. Statuettes and what looked like heavy geodes cascaded down around him, beaning him on the skull. 

It didn’t slow him down though. He got to his feet again like an idiot, and made to climb the ladder toward the upper book level, like he was about to launch himself at the troll. 

“You gonna step in, pet?” Spike inquired, watching with interest.

/I should./ This was getting out of hand. Buffy knew her friend didn’t like it when she interposed himself when he was getting his ass kicked, that it insulted his manly dignity or whatever, but there was a line. She judged that he had crossed it when his forehead started bleeding into his eyes and his mouth started dripping blood on his shirt.

Xander’s dignity would have to take the knock. After all, he had acquitted himself well already, right? /That troll could take four of him./ 

Accordingly, Buffy stepped right up and tapped the monster between the shoulder blades. “Excuse me. Is this fight taken?”

Olaf swung around to peer at her, fat cheeks puffing out in confusion. “Ah, it is the Slayer. Welcome. This tiny man was just entertaining me with a very weak brawl. Though…” He swung back, gave Xander a nod, hanging there from his ladder-perch and looking dazed but determined.  ** “ ** You fight well, for such a tiny man. I shall reward you.” And to Buffy’s amazement, the idiot troll grabbed her wrist; like, personal bubble, much? “Only one of your women shall die, and you shall be the one to choose.”

Xander blinked. “Uh, hold up…”

“Did he just say…” Willow agreed, sounding floored.

“Oh, this is gonna be precious,” Spike put in, arms crossed and leaning lazily against the doorjamb to the hall. He seemed utterly unconcerned that the troll had just named his mate as belonging to another guy. 

“Haha. Choose! This one, Anyanka, or the witch. One of your women must die.”

Clearly this oaf had some kind of female-ownership ideas straight out of the one-thousands, or whenever he’d been human and dated Anya. Which was fine and dandy, but not so much with the now.

Accordingly, Buffy punched the troll hard in the gut, loosening his hold to back off. “What’s your damage, you complete idiot? I’m the Slayer! Part one, I’m not Xander’s to choose from. Part two, neither is Willow. Part three, neither is any  _ other _ woman in the world, because we aren’t cows or something. Part four…”

“Part four, this is crazy troll logic,” Xander broke in, gaping. “Because even if you  _ could _ argue that any woman, like, possibly voluntarily belonged to anyone—which is, by the way, pretty much the absolute fastest ticket to never-having-sex-again, probably-gonna-end-up-cursed land unless  _ they’re _ the ones who say it, and probably only in the sack when they’re way not thinking clearly—I'm so not choosing between my girlfriend and my two best friends! Even if two of them could probably kick your butt with either fists or spells. You’re just asking for it, man!”

Off to one side, Anya was staring across the room as if she had never seen her guy before. “Xander?”

“What?” he asked, not quite glancing over his shoulder. His eyes remained locked on the troll.

“I love you.”

That did earn her full eye contact. “I love you too, Ahn,” he answered softly.

Another chuckle from the troll. “I do not understand your logic, but I like your refusal to choose. You are a loyal man.” And before Buffy could lunge to stop him, he had grabbed Xander by the arm… and broken his wrist like it was a twig. 

She heard the bone snap very clearly in the aghast silence.

Over by the counter, both Anya and Willow let off little screams. Xander groaned and turned the color of old silly putty. “Xander!” Willow gasped.

“Oh, you are so done.” Buffy sent a pile-driver of a punch for the troll’s jaw. It rocked his head back just slightly.

He backhanded her into the closest wall, right next to Spike. Which was just embarrassing. 

“Bloody hell, love.” Pushing out of his lazy lean, Spike dove at the monster. 

And was flung sideways into a freestanding bookshelf. He slid to the floor amid a cascade of New Age magazines. 

“Now,” Olaf demanded of Xander. “Choose!”

“Olaf, no!”

Xander pushed himself to his feet, voice tight with controlled anguish. “I'm not choosing.”

“Then you shall be the one who dies.” He made a grab for Xan’s hair, lifted that godawful hunk of hammer with the other, clearly prepared to brain his prey with it. 

Anya rushed at the troll, shouting, “No! Choose me! Just don't take him! Don't take Xander!”

Meanwhile, Willow was back to chanting some kind of spell in Latin, her voice hurried and anxious… which was maybe why the spell she was doing made the cash register vanish. 

It wasn’t much improvement on the disaster scene that was the store, so oh well.

Buffy scrambled for the troll, swinging a side of a bookshelf at his legs. It didn’t quite knock the bastard down, but Olaf did stagger. More importantly, he dropped Xander. Anya caught him, dragged him scramblingly away up against the counter, where he lay in her arms, cradling a now rapidly-swelling wrist.

Definitely broken. 

From over off to one side somewhere, half-behind a sagging shelf, Tara could be heard whispering some kind of spell of her own. 

Olaf whirled on her, raging.  _ “Witches! _ I smell another witch!”

“Tara, stay back!” Willow shrieked.

This was a horrible mess. No time to waste. Buffy rose and dove right back in to engage the monster. He’d hurt one of her people. He was so toast.

She punched him in the stomach. It was like hitting a building. 

Back on his feet and at her side, Spike danced in behind the unfazed troll to slug him a few times; roundhouses to the kidneys. No effect. Maybe a few chuckles for their ‘puny’ efforts.

“Buffy, the hammer! His strength’s in the hammer!” Anya’s voice, as she hovered over her damaged boyfriend, was friable with strain.

/And you couldn’t’ve told us that  _ before? _ / 

The jolly green giant swung said hammer at her head. Buffy ducked, punched him again, kicked at his knee. Misjudged her roll-away. The monster weapon struck her in the belly, lifting her like she was a feather. 

Breath gone, she sailed away to land atop some debris or other.

Off in the distant haze, she could hear Anya and Willow talking spell-work, and Spike shooting teasing barbs at the thing, then, “You alright, Slayer?”

She didn’t really have breath enough right now to reassure him.

“Anya! Distract him!” Willow muttered, her voice resolving from the din.

“How?”

“Piss him off!”

“I don’t…”

“I have faith in you. There is no one you cannot piss off.”

/Shit, they need time to make the spell or whatever./ Forcing herself to her feet, gasping, Buffy lunged for Olaf, rejoined the battle at Spike’s side. Thank goodness she’d had him here to keep the bastard off of her till she could get her breath back, or she’d’ve been flattened before she could regain her feet.

Time to resume the whole ‘grapple over the hammer’ game. /Maybe if we take turns?/

Eventually the jerk had to get tired, right? 

Momently, it was Spike’s turn to take flight, and crash down into a pile of what looked like broken polished-rock displays. /If he flings one of us and then the other, and then…/

“Hey, Olaf!” Rising from Xander’s side, Anya stood with arms crossed and legs akimbo to face down her brutal former. “You're as inadequate a troll as you were a boyfriend!”

Olaf’s head jerked over toward where his ex was cheerily shouting vindictive insults his way. He made an angry-sounding grunt. 

Buffy gave him a gut-shot, angled to the side. He grunted again, because he wanted to win the monosyllable king award of the day. /Keep going, Anya./

“You… You're hairy, and unattractive, and even women trolls are put off by your various odors.”

“No doubt,” Spike grunted, back again, and dodged a punch to kick the troll solidly in the knee.

Off to one side, by the register, Willow was muttering what were hopefully more auspicious things than before in Latin. Promisingly, the hammer glowed green for a second, which seemed to piss off dear Olaf. In revenge for this effect, he grabbed Buffy, lifted her by the throat. 

Spike elbowed him hard in the gut, the weight of both arms behind the move, then handed him a nice, solid uppercut to the hairy jaw. 

“Your menacing stance is merely alarming!”

Olaf dropped Buffy to swing around and glare at Anya, then jerked the hammer. Buffy stumbled away and narrowed her eyes at it. It wasn’t glowing anymore. Sucky.

“And your roar is less than full-throated!” Anya was really getting into this insult game now. Honestly, Buffy thought her charges were kind of hollow, but she really did seem to be unnerving the troll, who swung around at this last to bellow at his ex, outraged. 

_ “Desist!”  _ Apparently forgetting about Slayer and vampire, he stomped toward Anya. “My God, woman! It's been a thousand years, and yet you are as aggravating and emasculating as ever you were!” And he swung his ridiculously oversized weapon at her head.

Anya ducked.

_ “Vola cum viribus, dominum tuum nega. Vola!”* _

The hammer did the green and glowy thing again and flew right out of Olaf’s hand before it could hit Anya. It landed on the floor behind him, head down, and bobbled there for a moment before it stopped glowing.

Olaf seemed dumbfounded by the abrupt loss, staring at his empty hand in clear confusion. 

Still behind him, Buffy and Spike dove for the weapon in tandem. Their hands closed around it at once, and they stood for a moment smiling into each other’s eyes. Spike lifted his hands away, spread them. “Be my guest, Slayer. You know how I like to watch you work.”

“If I get tired of swinging this stupid-heavy thing, I’ll give you a turn.”

He tilted his head slightly; a move loaded with suggestion. “You give nice gifts, love, but I’m fine with the one we already discussed.”

Buffy grinned at her guy as she turned away to face the troll. “Be careful, Spike. People might end up thinking you’re a lover, not a fighter.”

“Who says I can’t be both?” he called in answer, and leaned lazily against a nearby pillar to enjoy the show.

“Not me,” she agreed, and raised her voice. “Hey. Olaf! So; your power’s in your hammer?”

Apparently this hint permitted their opposite number to recognize, finally, just where his tool had gone. He swung around, stalked away from the magicks section to stalk back toward her. “Give me back my weapon, miniscule blonde one!”

“Come and get it, big guy!” Brandishing the—albeit very heavy—weapon, Buffy got a few practice swings in to get a feel for it (it was way top-heavy, but she could see how it might pack a punch), then waited. And when the troll drew near enough, let fly with as wide a swing as she could manage, softball-style. 

He grunted as he fell back, eyes crossed. “Oh, now you shall all die!” he exclaimed from the floor. “Using a man’s… A troll’s own weapon against him! I will dispense no mercy, puny woman!”

“I was tired of fighting you unarmed. It seemed kind of an uneven combat situation.” Tossing a glance over her shoulder to catch Spike’s eye, Buffy jerked her head toward Xander. With a regretful sigh, he pushed away from the pillar to go check on the reclining, broken-armed Scooby.

While Buffy did her best to keep Olaf busy with his hammer, she half-watched out of the corner of her eye as Spike got Xander’s uninjured arm around his shoulders and, with Anya’s assistance, carted him around behind the dubious safety of the counter. Which was why she was distracted enough that the troll got a hit edgewise, knocking her clear across the room. Again.

“Oh, yeah!” Anya called, peeling herself out from under Xander’s armpit. “I forgot he still has all that troll-strength.”

“That’s great!” Buffy gasped back, not for the first time wishing she could just… not rely on oxygen as much. Not stop breathing completely, the way her guy could, since she kind of liked being alive… but the being less dependent on it thing? That looked kind of handy.

She did some more troll-wrassling; mostly to keep the hammer out of his paws. At one point she passed the hammer to a returned Spike in a quick game of keepaway, then punched the jerk in the face and yanked one of his massive arms up behind his back so her guy could clobber him right in the face with it while he was doubled over. 

The strike made ol’ Olaf grunt hard, and hopefully see stars. This time when he threw her off his back she didn’t go far, and landed on her feet. “Nice shot, honey!”

“Notice you only call me things like that when we’re fightin’, pet. What’s that about?”

Buffy paused mid-stalk, briefly considering it. “I dunno. Fighting’s like… our couple-y thing.”

“Mm.” He sounded dubious in response.

“Why do you continue to battle me, miniscule blonde ones?” the troll demanded, now crouched slightly with hands spread in a defensive posture. “Do you protect Anyanka and the human male I smell upon her?” He chuckled loudly, nearly belching with satisfaction. “They will not last. She also smells of others, which is quite amusing to me, considering the reason she turned me into a troll…” His beady eyes darted over to Xander, who rolled his. 

“Look, stinky. I know Anya’s got other guys. We’re in an open relationship. You ever heard of those?”

The troll ceased all forward movement. He straightened, and his brow furrowed as he processed this conversational entry. “You do not smell of other women.”

“Well, no. I…” Xander stuttered, ground to a halt. “That’s not my gig. But Anya can do whatever she wants.”

The piggy eyes narrowed. “Why would you not avail yourself of the opportunity to have many women, if you are any kind of man? Are you a eunuch of some kind, or incapable? Has your manly organ been damaged in battle, or…”

“What?  _ No! _ I’m… fine! More than fine, I’m…”

“Oh, he’s capable, Olaf! A hell of a lot more capable than you ever were! For one thing, he knows how to give me orgasms, which is something you never once figured out in three  _ years _ …”

Somewhat recovered, Xander snorted. “Probably not the best time to bring up thousand-year-old dirty laundry, Ahn.”

“You try being in a relationship for  _ three _ years—and staying faithful—while the other person goes out and screws other people, indiscriminately, and doesn’t give you a single orgasm that entire time!”

Xander winced. “You know, on second thought, I can maybe see why you got frustrated enough to curse him.” He turned back to Olaf. “Sorry, guy. I’m kind of on her side on this one.”

Olaf frowned, working through this. “She was a very difficult woman to please. Most woman shouted their pleasure and fawned upon me with each conquest…”   
  
“Oh, Olaf, for the Gods’ sake, they were faking it! Most women do, you gigantic idiot!”

Olaf turned the color of a pine tree, darkening with wrath. “No women must fake their pleasure with me! I am  _ Olaf!” _

“Ugh. And you wonder why I lean lesbian,” Willow muttered, grinding away at something with her mortar and pestle. 

Xander shook his head, still pale and cradling his damaged arm. “I mean… Are most guys this bad, or is it just him?”

“No, no, it’s most guys,” Buffy put in, leaning on the hammer. “You have to try a lot on—or get really, really lucky—to avoid settling for self-aggrandizing, completely clueless dopes like him.”

Xander’s eyes jerked over to meet Spike’s. He blushed and jerked his gaze away. “Uh, well, okay. Um, look, Olaf,” he began, but never got to finish.

“You are no man! I had thought you worthy, in your puny way! You fought well. But you enslave yourself to Anyanka like a thrall. I do not know how you can stand her. She is very difficult to live with…” His gaze turned to Anya, soured. “Though I can see how you would seek other lovers. This one is ludicrous and far too breakable.”

“Alright, you know what?” Anya burst out. “I’m done with all the insults to Xander. He’s been faithful for a year, even though he has had no reason to be; even though I told him he didn’t need to be, even though I practically threw him at other women, even at some men. He’s loyal and loving and gives excellent orgasms, and he’s opened his mind to learn about my past, my present. He’s grown significantly in the last several months. He’s a very worthy man. Far more worthy than you have ever been, Olaf! I think I’m about done with my own bored samplings; so yes. I think we  _ will _ last. Not that it’s any of  _ your _ business. And, I think it’s time you leave! Willow?”

Willow was staring at Anya, amazed. So was Xander. At the sound of her name, however, Wil jerked her gaze away, blinked down into her concoction, then drew in a deep breath, tossed the ground stuff into a nearby cauldron, and called, “Let the transposition be complete!”

Very abruptly, the raging troll just… vanished. 

Like, completely. Just… poof. Gone. Like the cash register. “Damn. Nice one, Wil.” /Maybe they’re not kidding about her being a seriously powerful… power./ It bore consideration.

Tara ducked out from behind her askew bookshelf. “Wow, baby! That was… Where did you send him?”

Anya answered for Willow, sounding extremely satisfied. She was cradling Xander’s broken wrist in both her hands, her stance attentive and gentle. “To the land of the trolls.” She turned the wrist over. Xander winced. “Poor baby,” she murmured.

“There’s a land of the trolls?” Xander asked, speaking through clenched teeth. His eyes, though, on Anya’s, were full of wonder.

“He’ll like it there,” Anya waved it off verbally. “It’s full of trolls.” She lightly touched the swollen area, hissed with Xander, nearly as pale now as he was.

“It's hard to be precise, though,” Willow put in with a shrug. “Alternate universes don't stay put. Trying to send him to a specific place is sort of like... Like... trying to hit a... puppy, by throwing a live bee at it.”

/Um, okay?/ Thrown, Buffy stared at her friend. She was joined in this activity by the rest of the room.

“Which is a weird image,” Willow went on, “and you should all just forget it.” Her eyes drifted to Anya and Xander, and a little smile touched the corners of her lips.

“It’s possible,” Anya went on, still gently cradling Xander’s wrist, “that he's in the land of perpetual Wednesday. Or the crazy melty land. Or, you know, the world without shrimp…” She gave the impression of a person who was barely listening to the words coming out of her own mouth. “We need to get this looked at…”

“There’s a world without shrimp?” Tara sounded oddly excited by this. At Willow’s stare, she looked away shyly. “What? I’m allergic.”

Willow turned back to Xander and Anya, thoughtful. “He’s probably in troll-land.” She sounded mostly certain.

“I only care that he’s not here, and I got this nifty souvenir.” Buffy hefted the hammer, then passed it to Spike. “Whaddya think, Sweetie? Next time we run smack into blondie, we hit her between the eyes with this thing, see how she likes it?”

Spike took it, bounced it on his palms once or twice, then lightly set it aside, head down, to close with her and grab her around the waist. “I think I like it when you call me things like ‘honey’ and ‘sweetie’, and we should head off somewhere else for a bit. Seeing as how you were talkin’ me up a while back, and makin’ noises about givin’ me a reward…”

“Okay, ugh. Having the broken wrist is bad enough. Ahn, please, take me to the hospital, and get me away from them before I have to witness any vamp-on-Slayer action? You know how they get after a battle.”

Buffy’s attention was mostly caught up in what Spike was doing, but she was still slightly concerned about Xander, so she did notice, sort of distantly, the way Anya glowed at her guy as she answered. “Absolutely. Let me go get the car, and then I’ll take care of you. My brave, loyal man.”

As they headed out through the back door, Willow came around the counter to draw even with Tara. “All in a day’s work.”

“Okay?”

“Nothing.” Smiling, she watched the ex-demon and her best friend from childhood as they exited through the rear of the store. “That just went nicely, I think. Though… I didn’t plan on the troll, of course.”

They all stared at her. “What, you planned on… You planned this whole…”

Willow turned innocent eyes on all of them. “Would I do that? Completely get on Anya’s nerves for days till she blew up at me, and I could shake her up enough to get her to tell me why she was so threatened by me, so I could finally challenge her to see that she needed to value Xander, because he’s grown and changed a lot, and she would never completely reevaluate the relationship unless someone got through that weird, blasé shell of hers first?” She shook her head slowly, an innocent smile plastered across her face. “Not me.”

Okay, behind that sweet face lay a totally devious mind. “Willow, you have the possibility of pure evil hidden behind that bland exterior. Who knew?”

“I,” Willow answered loftily, “will do anything for a friend. Especially one who’s suffering. And Xander’s been suffering. I know he loves her. I even get why, sort of. But Anya…  _ She _ doesn’t get why he loves her. And maybe… maybe now he’ll be able to convince her.”

Tara grabbed both of Willow’s hands and dragged her away to swing her in a wide, looping circle. “You’re insane.”

“Maybe.” Their eyes danced on each other’s.

“I love you like crazy.”

“Oh. Well, that’s good.”

“Take me home and make love to me.”

“Well, then!” Willow grinned widely and threw over her shoulder, “Bye!” Dancing in circles, the two witches vanished through the front door of the shop.

Buffy shook her head, eyeing the mess in the place. “It’s gonna take a full witchy circle-deal to fix this disaster, isn’t it?”

Spike caught her hands. “Not our problem. Cleanup’s theirs. Think right now Glinda’s got the right idea.” He dragged Buffy up close, grinned into her eyes. “Take me to the crypt and make love to me, woman.”

Buffy lifted a brow, amused. “You do know that I’m all sweaty and covered in dust, right?”

He growled and caught her butt, ground hard against her to show her exactly how very little he gave a damn. “Slayer!”

“Fine. But you’re officially disgusting.”

“I can live with that. Bloody hell, love, you drive a man mad…”

He inspired bright, delighted smiles. “Flattery’ll get you just about anything you want…”

“Oh, yeah? Get me you callin’ me sweet pet names while I shag you blind?”

Buffy considered it as she turned away to head for the car. It felt weird, saying those things in an unironic tone, outside of battle. But he really seemed to like it. “I’ll… think about it.”

“You do that, Buffy,” he husked into her ear, and held tight to her hipbones, to keep close the reminder of what she did to him, all the way out to where their chariot lay in wait.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
So, according to at least two separate translation sources, the folks who wrote the original episode sources served us just as much crap-"latin" as we manage to produce now, with our enhanced interwebs access. Per all my searches, "Vola cum viribus, dominum tuum nega. Vola!" means very little indeed. Something about either Matthew and a rapier, and the lord, or something flying, but nothing with any really distinct conceptual follow-through. (Though a reader on EF with better Latin-skillz than I could ever have said it said something about being commanded to fly, so maybe it's good? Or maybe we should just call it Harry-Potter-esque 'magickspeake', and leave it at that? Because tbf, I got this from the transcript site, which, who knows, right?)  
  
Love to you all!!!


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... the characters got away from me in this chapter, and had me break an unspoken rule of mine, to which I've held true in pretty much EVERY FIC I HAVE EVER WRITTEN IN EVERY 'VERSE I HAVE EVER FICCED SINCE TIME BEGAN, the punks... grr. There are certain scenes I refuse to do, certain tropes I refuse to entertain (at least with straight couples, because they're overdone, though I'll do them on occasion with gay couples, because somehow it seems less mawkish to me?)... Luckily it came out less sappy than cute and moving (I hope)... or at least so Twinkes assures me, or else I might've scrapped the entire chapter and ran screaming in the other direction, because if it was sappy I'd've burned down the world.
> 
> I can't with maudlin, twee stuff. DAMN these two for getting this scene out of me. (Though, to be fair to them, this is pretty close to their anniversary, so they have an excuse.)

Thanksgiving was kind of weird without Giles. He called in, of course. Not that he really cared about the wholly American holiday, she thought, so much as because he knew it was important to his odd brood of adoptive stateside post-adolescent youth. He addressed them all on speakerphone… and even had a special message just for Spike. ‘Now, please, Spike, if you will; just make sure, in my stead, that none of them digs up any sort of burial ground, or incites any spirits to revenge themselves, or anything of that nature, while I’m away, will you? I’d prefer to hear, upon my return, that nothing all that untoward occurred to plague them during this oddity of a holiday; not especially anything involving arrows, or persons turning into bears, or Angel showing up to put his great nose into places it doesn’t belong.’

“Well, I’ll certainly bloody well make sure there’re no bears… and Christ knows Angelus knows better than to show his idiot mug around here again…”

“Yeah,” Buffy muttered, briefly halting all stirring of the bowl she carried firmly clenched to her ribs by one arm. “The last thing we need right now is another visit from the LA crew. It usually means something bad.” /Though, given the dreams, we’re probably gonna get one sooner or later./ She tried not to think about what that would look like, just as much as she tried not to reflect back on who she had been a year ago, when she had marched off to Los Angeles to confront Angel for lurking around behind her back snooping on her life. Brief though the visit had been, it had been confusing.

/Thank goodness Spike and I un-confused everything a little bit later./

Spike shrugged into the silence, eyes touching on hers. “Don’t worry, love. Tall, dark, and forehead is unlikely to want to come back and face us, now he can feel I’m off the family chain. He’ll know what it means.”

He didn’t voice the unspoken implication; that Drusilla would also feel their mutual claim, and would be similarly aware. Speaking of unwelcome visitations that were definitely likely to occur at some point or other. 

/Ugh./ So many other shoes just waiting to drop.

There was a profound silence from Giles, then, ‘Despite the fact that I still cannot entirely fathom the meaning behind your bizarrely late harvest tradition, I do regret missing it. Know that I’m there with you in spirit. Spike, have a dram for me, will you, and say a few words in English that isn’t horribly mangled?’

“I’ll raise a glass or two for us both, Watcher.”

The Brit camaraderie was real. Which made it even more bizarre to think of how much things had changed in a year. Last Thanksgiving, Spike had been a captive tied to a chair, being taunted with gravy filled with cooked turkey blood and forced to watch them all feasting in front of him while he went hungry. Buffy was still absolutely ashamed of that whole scene, in retrospect; especially since within like a week and a half of that event, that captive, ambivalent enemy had unexpectedly become pretty much her ally and her everything. 

This year he was utterly a part of every facet of planning and execution of the feast; which was only fair, since he was utterly a part of every facet of her life now. /And in a way, this is kind of an anniversary of when he truly first came into my life in this, like, modern incarnation of us./ Though, technically, their ‘anniversary’ wouldn’t be for another couple of weeks. /Such craziness. It’s been a year./

/ _ We’ve _ been a year./

As the call closed down, Mom set the phone back in the cradle, then rubbed the base of her thumb briskly between her eyes. “You do know that if he was here he would probably insist on being the one to cut the turkey. As if I can’t do it.” And then she shot a brief, shushing glance at Spike. “Unless you’re going to pull the manly card on me…”

Spike grinned at her, complete with rolled tongue. “Joyce, it’s your home. Far be it from me to tell a Summers woman she can’t handle a blade. I might just as well hide under the soddin’ table while you go to.”

Buffy rolled her eyes as she returned to her brisk stirring. “Suck up,” she informed him, and turned away to head back into the kitchen.

“Bein’ real, here.”

“Uhuh.”

“Oi, pet?”

“Mmm?”

“Need me in there cutting up summat or another? Speakin’ of blades.”

Buffy tilted her head, considering it. “You wanna chop up the onions? You don’t get the whole onion-tear thing.”

“Public service, is it?” Shoving himself to his feet, he relinquished the couch to Xander and Anya, who it must be said, had turned into a giant ball of cuddle almost twenty-four-seven since the whole troll incident, and probably didn’t even notice that he’d vacated the space. “Right, then. On my way.”

Willow and Tara looked up from their own cuddle-fest, dropped their eyes to the canoodling going on on the couch, exchanged glances, then came to a clear decision. “Can we help at all?”

In the end, everyone found a spot in the kitchen doing something useful, except for the two lovebirds. No announcement had been made or anything, but Buffy kind of got the feeling that Xan and Anya had gone from open to exclusive in there somewhere, the way they were being all attached at the hip and adorable and totally forgetting there was anybody else in the world but them. /What do you know? One troll-battle, and all the sudden their relationship leveled up./

The kitchen crew were shuttling finished dishes out to the dining room when out of nowhere Mom cornered them, because she was ruthless. “So, speaking of get-togethers, you two… Have you given any thought to that discussion we had when I was in the hospital? I know I’m not going into surgery anymore, but the question still stands…”

/Oh my God, Mom, way to put us on the spot in front of literally everybody./ 

In that moment Spike was setting down a bowl of yams topped with about two inches of roasted marshmallows. Struck broadside by the question he froze, bent over, almost dropping the casserole dish to the wooden surface below. Buffy set down her own much larger casserole, the green bean one with the French onion topping, closed her eyes, and took a few deep breaths. “Is this really the time, Mom?” she managed finally, in what she hoped was a calm and steady tone.

“I think it’s the perfect time, Buffy. With people you consider family all around… who can also be my witnesses, and hold you and Spike accountable.”

/Oh, man./ “There’s just, been… a lot going on. We haven’t even, you know… discussed it…”

_ “Really.” _ Mom turned flashing eyes on Spike, who still hadn’t straightened, and who looked seriously on the verge of fleeing. Why did he always look so ready to quail under Mom’s glares? “Isn’t that interesting. Tell me, young man. Why is it such a difficult proposition? Is it the propriety, or the dress that’s your stumbling block?”

Spike set down his dish very, very carefully, straightened, and did some kind of move that Buffy did not recognize in the slightest. He drew himself up super-stiffly, lifted his chin like his collar—which was nonexistent, by the way—was poking him in the jaw, and tugged at the bottom of his t-shirt like he was adjusting it and checking for wrinkles or something. “Ma’am, I would like nothing more than to behave in the most proper way with regard to your daughter. I hold her in the highest possible esteem. But considering that in all ways I must bow to her sensibilities—in  _ every _ regard—the decision must be made in a mutual fashion.”

/Oh, wow./ When he talked like that, he’d really been punched in the gut, and completely knocked back in time.

Also, was he really waiting on her? Did he think that  _ she _ … That she wouldn’t…

Though, considering that she had never brought it up again, and how she had acted after the spell wore off, maybe he did. / _ Oh _ ./

Somewhere off in the distance, Buffy knew that both Dawn and Jonathan were watching them with wide, staring eyes. That Willow and Tara were in the kitchen doorway, whispering to each other, clearly embarrassed and also kind of amused, maybe, at Spike’s transformation. She was also vaguely aware of the sudden cessation of sweet nothings whispered in the living room, the rustle of movement as Xander and Anya stood to creep over to the doorway and listen in. 

Buffy bit her lip, and turned aside from the table to meet Spike’s eyes. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

He cleared his throat, without looking at her. “Yeah,” he answered, very, very softly, and tore his eyes away from Mom’s to follow her as she pivoted to head away, down the short hall toward the back door. 

Behind them, a quiet chaos of whispers reigned, loaded with unsubtle supposition and concerned-excited theorizing.

None of it mattered. None of it but the ferocious trembling in his hands as she turned to him, tugged him over to the far end of the now-deserted living room. She would drag him outside for much greater privacy, but it was still late afternoon right now, and it would do her no good to have this conversation with a big pile of dust. “Hey. Look at me.”

He did. His eyes, as he met hers, were a ragged jumble of unreadable emotion, but she could feel him, and that was enough. Naked fear, yearning, tenderness, want, shame—why shame?—all wrapped up in a vast, roaring uncertainty. “Spike.”

He shrugged. His eyes glanced away.

She tried again. “You know I kept the ring.”

“Yeah,” he whispered, and there was the uncertainty.

Apparently that wasn’t enough. “Talk to me.”

A tiny, one-shouldered shrug. “You thought it was all the spell, Buffy. And the way you acted, after…”

Naked fear again, swamping the rest. /Oh, man./ “So… it wasn’t all the spell, I’m guessing?”

His eyes jerked to hers, slid away again. “Christ, love, how could it be? I just… After you… I watched you to see how you were gonna act. And when you…” A tiny shrug. “I just did what it looked like you wanted me to. But it wasn’t how I felt.”

/Oh./ Closing her eyes briefly, Buffy nodded. “To be fair, I was mostly doing what I thought I was supposed to.” She opened her eyes on his. “You know where I was. I couldn’t let myself feel what I was feeling.”

“Yeah,” he allowed. A thread of understanding, beneath the yearning. Tenderness, for them both. But still, underneath it all, uncertainty reigned.

Silence overtook them. Buffy broke it, eventually, confusion utmost. “Why didn’t you ever… try again, if… I mean, since?” 

And there was the shame, roaring back in, with interest. “Because…” His eyes came to roost on hers, haunted. “Because, what if this is enough for you, Buffy? What if you said no? I couldn’t take that again. You’ve mated the monster in me, and Christ, that’s more than I’ve ever thought I’d ever have… but the man in me…” His eyes shuttered once more, and the trembling in him turned to a quaking. “There’re things about me you’ve never known, because I never told you. About who I was. About how I died, and why. About…” He shook his head fiercely, clenched his teeth. “I bloody well couldn’t take it if I went on my knees before you again, asked to have you in that way, asked for your hand, and you…”

He broke her heart, sometimes. “Why would I say no?” she heard herself whisper back.

He gnawed at his lip, squinched his eyes tighter, as if he were absolutely unable to face her. “Because,” he breathed, “I’m nowhere near good enough for you, as I am. Man or monster.”

/Okay, what…/

“Because it’s one thing that you’ve let yourself be paired to the beast in me. The beast who satisfies your own base needs and desires. That’s all well and good, and Buffy, that I can satisfy you in that way is a wonder. But that you might…” 

/Oh, crap. Spike…/ 

His eyes snapped open, agonized on hers. “And because… Because I know how you feel about your parents’ marriage…” Something nigh to rage leapt into his gaze then, ferocious and unquenchable. “Which,  _ fuck _ that, Buffy, because we’re not  _ them! _ And maybe I’m being unfair, because my parents had a bloody lovely marriage, so I might never understand how you feel about it, and you can hate me for that all you want…”

/Alright, note to self to seriously dig into that open door, ASAP, but also, talk about assuming too much!/ 

“…And I know you still bloody well think you might die tomorrow, and you don’t want to leave me alone in that way, so you might think you’re doin’ me some sort of soddin’ favor by not acceptin’, when you bloody well know I’d follow you the instant you went; walk right into the bleedin’ sun after you, so it doesn’t fucking matter, does it? I won’t stay here to mourn you. But if you think…”

“Just shut up,” Buffy whispered, and reached up, caught his neck, dragged him down to kiss him hard and fierce, because he was making her insane, and how had he been hiding all this without her knowing it; like a bomb about to go off? 

He didn’t respond at first, he was so caught up in whatever nutso thing he had going on. But she knew how to kiss him to make him give in to her. Which he did after a second; clinging hard to her food-spotted blouse, nails digging into her sides, desperate and yearning. And when she finally pulled away, it was to half-glare at him as she lifted the chain up over her head. “You’re an idiot. Why the hell do you think I wear the damn thing all the time, you doofus?” And she dropped it into his hand, ring and all.

He blinked down at the silver skull, warmed by her body heat. When he lifted his eyes to hers, they flared with the beginnings of hope. “Buffy…”

“You don’t have to do it the same way, obviously. I already have a really good one under my belt. The only one I’ve ever had, by the way. The only one I thought I ever would have. But if you wanna try to top it…”

“Oh, Christ, pet…” He was flooding her now, with more emotions than she even knew how to parse, knew what to do with. Then his eyes flitted away, and he shook his head. “This one isn’t good enough for you, though.”

She blinked at this, taken aback. “I’ve had it for a year, and it’s so  _ you _ …”

He shook his head. “It’s… not what I thought I’d give to you. It doesn’t even fit your finger. It says ‘spur of the moment’. It doesn’t say, ‘I planned this, because I want this woman, for all of time; to be my partner in all things’.”

“Oh.” She could barely talk now, with the things he was saying. He was so…  _ earnest _ . 

“This one, though,” he went on, and held up one finger, to signal a halt in the conversation. “Stay here, pet. Just… hold that thought.” And, out of nowhere, he jogged away, toward the front door.

/Um, okay?/ Bewildered, she slipped the chain back over her neck, if only for something to do, and watched while he rummaged in his duster on the coat tree.

Then he was back, almost before she had a chance to wonder just what the hell was going on. He was looking (and feeling) very shy now as he… oh. Went on both knees in front of her. Not just one. And she knew there were several heads peeping around the corner of the stairway, watching them, and she couldn’t care less, as he opened a little black velvet drawstring pouch and tipped it up, and two shining objects fell into his hand. “Wh…”

Spike regarded the two rings in his palm for a long moment, then shook his head and put one back in the bag, tugged it shut. “My father was an odd duck for a man of his day. Most men didn’t wear rings, then. But since he was away in the wars, and he loved Mum, he chose to have one made, to let her know that he’d be constant. Mum’s…” He shook his head, eyes still on his palm. “Didn’t take much from the house, after. Just this, from the armoire. She couldn’t wear it, near the end, because her fingers’d swelled. Arthritis. Lucky thing, or…” He cut off abruptly, a swell of agony filling him, and his voice tightened. “Any road, if you…” 

He jerked his head again, lifted his eyes to hers. They were liquid and filled with entreaty. “Carried ‘em for a hundred twenty years, Buffy. Don’t even know why, ‘cept they were all I had left. Had ‘em put away, for a while, in a safe deposit box, but started keepin’ ‘em on me, recently, in case I ever got the sodding guts to...” And then he dragged in a long, deep breath. “If you’ll do me the honor, Buffy Anne Summers, of wearing my ring. Of…” He went incredibly still, then, in that vampire way. “Will you say yes to me again, Buffy?” he asked softly. “This time, in sound mind, and take me as I am, knowing I give you my all and everything, and that you have every part of me?”

Buffy swallowed around a throat closing tight against a vast swell of emotion. /God, you’ve been just, like, carrying these around in your duster? For how long?/ “I’d really like that,” she told him softly, and held out her left hand. It was only then that she realized out of nowhere that it was shaking. “I’d really like it if you’d… do the same.”

His hand shook in hers, so hard she was afraid he would fall apart or something. The emotions between them went through some kind of massive crescendo, then… “That would be my greatest honor, my love.” He shook his head then. “There’s only one problem.” And he gently kissed the knuckles of her left hand, and dropped it to move to the other side, where he lightly brushed the fingers of her right. “How one used to do it was, you put the ring on the right hand. Then, when you went through the ceremony, you moved it to the left. If…” Worried blue eyes rose to meet hers. “If you want to do it that way.”

“Oh.” Surprised, but amenable, Buffy switched hands. She actually kind of liked the symbolism. The ring would move to his side when they… When they… “Where do you want to…”

His gaze on hers was steady now, as he lifted her fingers to his mouth, slipped the ring on—amazingly, it fit perfectly—and kissed her over the circlet of gold. “Do you wanna plan it this time, or just leave it all up to Mum?” And his eyes sparkled on hers with the beginnings of amusement, behind the cloak of sobriety.

“Oh, man. If we leave it all up to her, who knows how she’ll dress you. And besides; we definitely need to pick our own song.”

His eyes were  _ dancing _ now. “Walkin’ back on ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’, is it?”

Grabbing his other hand, she dragged him back up to his feet. “Are you trying to piss me off?” she asked him, low and instigating.

His arms slid around her waist, eyes never leaving hers. “Not at the moment,” he answered, and lowered his forehead to hers. “Bloody hell, Buffy.” And he rocked his head slowly back and forth, the enormous, shy pleasure of her acceptance of his suit filling them both with awe and amazement and… 

“Hey. C’mere.” Tilting his chin up with her fingers, she slid them into his hair and pulled him in for another kiss. 

That took a little time. And the wonder in his kiss was a tangible thing. When she finally broke free for air, she pulled his forehead back to hers, sighed a little, smiled. “So. I’m a wanton sex fiend who only wanted to marry your demon, but would never even think about marrying the man in you?”

He stiffened. Groaned. “Buffy…”

“Remind me to interrogate you later about all this, ‘You don’t know why I died’ crap.”

“Bloody fuck.” Leaning away, he eyed her warily. “Always gonna have me guessin’, innit?”

“You know it.” /And don’t you forget it./

***

The ring, upon inspection, had what Willow and Tara assured her was very interesting symbolism. “It’s a gladiolus,” Tara told her, awe in her voice. “In the Victorian language of flowers, it… kind of completely fits you two.”

“Okay?”

“Well, all those old flower meanings were kind of all over the place. They mean lots of different things. But this one meant… honor, and remembrance. I think, um, strength of character and faithfulness, and…” Looking up, as if she were reading a script in her mind, Tara pondered, then, “Um, sincerity and… integrity? It was…”

“It was the bloom thrown at the feet of the gladiator,” Spike broke in quietly. “The warrior forced to fight, but who makes the battle their own in spite of all that.” 

Buffy felt her throat tighten. “Oh.” /Damn./

Spike’s eyes were riveted on hers, now. “I always thought of it as the flower of the warrior for love. But then, plenty of people would call me a fool.”

He was always so tough on himself. “I don’t,” she whispered back.

“May I see it?” Mom asked, breaking into the pregnant pause.

“Oh. Yeah.” Buffy shifted her hand in Mom’s direction without taking her eyes off of Spike’s riveted gaze.

Mom studied the ring for a long moment, then reached out one finger to trace it lightly. “It’s lovely, William,” she murmured. “When did you have it cleaned?”

That jerked Buffy’s attention away from Spike’s face, and she stared down at the ring with its dull gold petals, the obvious patina still buried deep in every crevice.

“Oh. Ah… A few months back, Mum.”

He’d had it cleaned. Which, Buffy supposed, made sense, since it was a hundred and… what? 

/Holy damn./ Her ring was a hundred and, like, sixty years old. /And he carried it all this time. And then he gave it to  _ me _ ./

“So, um, how long have you been planning this, huh, Spike?” Dawn put in, sounding totally mischievous.

“I’d say about seven months or so, right?” Jonathan put in, completely out of the blue.

Spike’s eyes rose, flaming, to incinerate the small man with a glare. “You keep your soddin’ trap shut, you.”

“Um, okay?” Buffy asked, confused now. “What…”

Jonathan smiled sweetly at her, apparently uncowed by Spike’s threats. “My family are jewelers, Buffy. Spike found that out after I joined the gang, and came into the store one day and had them look the rings over. Had ‘em resized, cleaned…”

Spike scowled some more at him. “If I knew you knew about that I’d’ve drained you long since, you little…”

“Don’t I get credit for keeping my mouth shut all this time?”

Spike subsided abruptly, clearly thrown by this alteration in outlooks. “Oh, sodding hell. Alright, then. Mind me to entrust you with any secrets, I suppose, from here on out.”

Buffy was starting to develop an  _ issue _ . “Let me get this straight.  _ Jonathan _ knew you were gonna propose again, more than half a  _ year _ before I did?”

“Don’t take it hard, Buffy,” Jonathan informed her, and patted her hand. “If your family’s in the jewelry business, you learn all the town’s dirt. You take a sort of unspoken vow of secrecy. It’s in the fine print. I’ve been dying, wondering when he’d get up the guts to pop the question.” He swung on Spike then, and risked life and limb to pat him on the back. “Took you long enough, dude, but congrats on finally going there.”

Spike growled, low and threatening. 

“Oh, Spike, stop it.” Buffy shook her head at Jonathan, amazed. “Just, wow.”

Jonathan smiled and turned to head back for the kitchen. “It’s a great ring, Buffy. Seriously. You have no clue what that thing is worth. It’s a total heirloom. Don’t lose it. My mom practically cried herself to sleep every night for three days after she cleaned it.”

/Damn. Talk about pressure./ Buffy shot her vampire a curious glance, wondering if he cared that she was apparently wearing some kind of priceless piece of hardware on her finger. 

Spike avoided her eye to push away from the table. “Best finish that stuffing, I reckon.” And he turned to retrace his steps for the food prep area.

Mom paced him. “Cut some chives, will you, Spike? And throw a few over the turkey. I need to baste it anyway.”

Buffy sat for a while, digesting the events of the last few moments. Mom’s conditional approval, meanwhile, seemed ensured by the way she was interacting with Spike in the other room. By the sounds of it, her ‘young man’ was back in the fold again.

The oven rack rattled. “Joyce, do you think…”

“Oh, not so much.” A lighthearted admonishment. “Save some for the stuffing.”

“Yes, Mum.”

“So, uh… doin’ the wedding thing for realsies this time, huh Buff?”

Lifting her eyes from the girl-party, Buffy glanced over at Xander and wondered if he would pull a freakout on her. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Cool. I mean, as long as it’s not in the middle of winter. Or, you know, the dead of summer. Or… wait. You’re not gonna be outside either way, right, because vampire? So I guess either way it’ll be climate-controlled, so you won’t be roasting or freezing us… I mean, not that you can go the church route, if you don’t wanna burn the dude, but… So, where…”

Buffy assessed her friend, startled at this whacked-out diatribe. “I don’t think we really planned the logistics that far out, Xan, but thanks I guess for being so concerned for Spike’s wellbeing?”

“Yeah, of course. I mean, no one wants to see the bridegroom go up in smoke. It would make for a lame party.” 

From afar off in the kitchen, a snort of dark amusement. 

“Yeah, no,” Buffy answered, smiling in reminiscence. “Whatever we do, there will be no registering as Mr. and Mrs. Big Pile of Dust.”

“Appreciate that, pet,” Spike called from the other room.

Anya piped in then. “Logistically, there are other concerns. How will you pay for the wedding? Which of his family will you invite? Which of  _ your _ family will you invite? How will you seat them, how many of them will be in the know, how will you explain his vampiric traits to those who are not…”

“Uh…” Buffy retreated figuratively, taken aback. “My… I mean, we can use the good old ‘sun allergy’ excuse, and, um… Maybe just not invite the busybodies, like Aunt Arlene…”

“Buffy, you will not disinvite your Aunt Arlene.”

“Oh.”

“And, obviously you’re going to have to tell your father at some point.”

Buffy quailed inwardly. The last time she had discussed vampires with her father, he had had her thrown into a psych ward. “Um…”

Spike promptly popped his head around the kitchen doorway, as always reading her vibe like a book. “Buffy, what’s wrong? I know he’s not like to approve of me, but…”

“No, it’s not…”

“And obviously I don’t want a lot of my own family there, but if we have to have my sire, and soddin’  _ Angel _ …”

“Oh, God.” She hadn’t even  _ thought _ of that. God,  _ Drusilla _ might…

“‘Sides. Eventually I would’ve had to meet your father anyway, so…”

“It’s not that,” Buffy heard herself whisper, and turned an anguished gaze on her mother. “Do you think we can just… not tell him, Mom?”

Mom frowned, set down her potato and peeler, and sighed heavily. “Buffy, he can’t… We won’t ever let it happen again. For one thing, you’re an adult, and for another, you have me on your side now, alright?”

Dawn’s eyes were wide on her. “Wh…”

Buffy shook her head once, hard. “Never mind. You were eleven. You don’t remember.” /Because they didn’t tell you. Just, ‘big sis went on a little trip…’/ Her stomach lurched, remembering the ‘quiet room’, and the muscle-softening drugs, and… /And then Giles did it, which…/

It was enough. Spike slammed down his knife and marched out of the kitchen to join her. “Buffy…”

“Not right now,” she whispered, eyes on her hands. “I’ll… I’ll tell you later.”

His new wrath, tightly held in check, was a coiled, breathing viper in their shared being, but he nodded, stilling himself. “Alright, love.” 

“Dawn,” Mom cautioned, voice taut, “come in here. I need your help.”

“Oh, man. I miss all the good convos.” Dawn flounced away, looking put out to have been asked to leave.

“Oookay, so…” Xander’s eyes darted all around the room. “How about that football game?”

“How about you two?” Buffy grasped shakily, seeking for something, anything to change the subject. Grateful for Spike’s presence, she leaned back against his firm, cool, vibratingly tense body, and nodded at the intertwined hands in front of her. She approved of the way Xan and Anya leaned into each other now; like they were trying their best to be inextricable. “All… doing the thing now. Like… Are you two… Have you decided to just be…”

Anya smiled, eyes drifting to Xander’s face. “I have decided that I am currently satisfied with only Xander. He deserves my full and undivided attention for the time being. I want us to get to know one another better in our current iteration, because I think we’ve grown and changed. That doesn’t mean the change will be permanent, but for now…”

Willow did the  _ ‘cough-cough’ _ thing. Hidden in the middle of it was a very unsubtle, “About time!”

“Sweetie…” Tara upbraided her girlfriend.

“Sorry,” Willow answered, though she didn’t sound all that regretful.

Buffy was right there with her. “I’m glad for you. That you’re doing the monogamy thing.” She took them in; the cuddliness of them. “It’s really cool to see.”

Xander eyed her for a moment, eyes glancing from her to Willow and back again. And, surprisingly, he frowned. “That’s not what it’s like, Buffy, Wil,” he informed them, firm and uncompromising. And then he surprised Buffy by lifting Anya’s hand to kiss it. 

/Um, okay?/ “That’s not what… what’s like?”

“It’s not like being monogamous is better, and being… the way we were is somehow not as good. There are things about me that can’t fulfill all of Anya’s needs—like knowing and understanding what it’s like to be a demon—and that’s okay.” Xander made a face, like he was seeking for the right words for something. “I’d feel like I was constantly falling short if I tried to be everything to her when I could never ever live up to being that for her.”

Behind Buffy, Spike made a rumbling noise that sounded almost like agreement, which, what?

“But there are things I can give her that no one else can, so why should I feel threatened if she has other… friends who give her that demon-y piece? It doesn’t take away from what we have.”

Buffy found herself thrown utterly off course by this unexpected dissertation. “But…”

Xander lifted his eyes to the vampire behind her. There was no bitterness in them, just a faint ironic light. “I mean, maybe you and Spike can fulfill almost every part of each other, by some miracle, and that’s awesome… but no one person can ever fulfill  _ everything _ for someone else. It’s, like, unhealthy to expect it.”

Buffy opened her mouth to retort, then subsided, because Xander wasn’t done yet.

“That’s why we have friends. I can geek out with Jonathan without making Ahn listen to me talk about  _ Star Wars  _ or Spiderman comics for hours, and that can actually save our relationship…”

/Okay, but I don’t have sex with the people I talk fashion with, or…/

“If I was ever to end up screwing somebody over our mutual love of geeky stuff, that wouldn’t threaten what Ahn and I have either, because that other person wouldn’t give me what she does. It would be like…” He waved a hand around in the air. “It would be like if Oz had stayed in town. What if Wil and Oz and Tara were in a three-way relationship…”

“Hey!”

“…Because Wil still wanted some guy-action once in a while; but that wouldn’t take away from what she and Tara have, right? And what she and Tara have wouldn’t take away from what she and Oz had, because, you know, either way, they’d give each other something different…”

“Nobody asked to be part of your examples, Xan!”

Xander ignored Willow’s protests. “And just so you know, when Ahn is with other people… I mean, how can I get mad about that? I don’t own her. I for sure don’t own her body. Saying I do would be… like, slavery.” 

“Wh…” He didn’t even get  _ jealous? _

“Besides. She always tells me I make her feel good, so I shouldn’t be threatened, right? Especially when I know it’d be the same way for me. If I was with someone else, I know I’d always come back to her, because we know each other in a way that no one else does. That’s what makes it special. And the only time she ever got threatened with me is when I spent more time with someone else than I did with her, because quality time is a big deal.” He shook his head; firm negation. “So no, I don’t think we’ve, like, stepped up to some better form of relationship or something. We’re doing something different for a while, and that’s cool. But I believe that what we were doing before was right for us, and if we do it again, it’ll be right for us.”

Buffy simply couldn’t fathom it. Couldn’t fathom not feeling insecure if your significant other was sleeping with someone else, couldn’t fathom not being hurt if they told you to do it too. But Xander sounded so convinced that he was okay with it, which… “Uh, alright, Xan. If you say so.” 

Into the subsequent silence, Anya tilted her head curiously, then leaned around Xander’s arm. “Don’t worry, Buffy. It’s a difficult concept for most people raised to believe serial monogamy is the only acceptable relationship form, and that if you want someone else, you have to throw away everything about your current relationship to try on another person. Everything in the media and every family message tells you this is the only truth.” She waved a dismissive hand. “I’m sure Spike knows that that isn’t the only workable relationship style…”

/Oh, he better not!/ Buffy whirled around to stare at her vampire, who, it must be said, was wearing a particularly bitter countenance at the moment. “Yeah, but he was in a nest. That was, like, required. He didn’t  _ agree _ to it.”

Spike grunted; the monosyllable of acknowledgment. “Did it long enough. Over it. Though I agree no one owns anyone else.” He lifted his chin, indicative of assent. “Your body’s your own, pet. Do with it what you will.”

“Okay, you know what? I…”

His lips twisted, as if he thought she were being recalcitrant. “Just for the bloody record, yeah?”

“What are…” /Like I would  _ do  _ that! Just, what?/ After Drusilla, Spike would be so  _ hurt _ if she ever…  _ Wouldn’t _ he? Not that she wanted to, could ever imagine wanting to, but...

“In the meantime,” Anya broke in, as if she thought she was helpful in changing the subject, “have you decided how you’re going to pay for this ridiculously overpriced money-drain of a ceremony? Most weddings, by the way, end in disaster. At least, statistically-speaking, and speaking from my own experience.”

Buffy was suffering from serious subject-whiplash. She swung back around to turn a confused frown on the ex-demon. “Thanks for the optimism,” she answered dryly.

“No charge.”

“I’ve been thinkin’ about digging back into that Amara hoard, actually,” Spike put in, a quiet aside. “Could demand Angel give me whatever’s left of the family bullion, since God knows there has to be something of it left after Nest kicked off… But then I think about how the git’s been living down there in LA—you said that chit Cordelia’s always complaining that they can’t even manage a decent cup of coffee, innit?—and I wonder why the bloody hell the berk hasn’t tapped into the fund yet, unless the old bastard found a way to cut him off, or used it all up somehow? He surely had access to it beforehand, or we wouldn’t have been living in the soddin’ house on the hill, yeah? So who knows. And I’m not sure I wanna confront him about it, either.” Spike’s hand rose, drifted very lightly, of its own accord, to trail over her bite, up into her hair. “Not since we’ve claimed each other. He might lose his bloody mind and try to off me or some such shite, and whether she loves him anymore or no, Slayer might take it a bit hard if I have to dust the blighter…”

Buffy sighed. “I’d really rather you didn’t, if only because he seems to be doing some good down there in the city. Not that I don’t have every faith in the world in you.” Frowning, she rubbed a knuckle between her eyebrows. “It honestly never occurred to me to wonder how he afforded the mansion.”

“And all those fancy dress suits… Armani, love, just to haunt around the edges of things…”

Buffy blinked. “Armani?”

“You didn’t notice?” He shot her a disappointed look. “I thought you were a bit of a fashionista in your secondary days.”

Stung, Buffy shot back, “Well, I wasn’t paying attention to the cut of his pants.”

“Soddin’ glad to know it.”

/Oh, you!/ “I was being a moony teenager and looking into his sad, sad eyes.”

“Oh, bloody hell.”

Buffy gave in to roll her eyes. “I did notice that once he went all Evil Dead on us, he suddenly discovered leather.”

Spike snorted. “Yeah. Thought he was a right toppy bastard, didn’t he?”

/Ew./ “I thought I told you I never wanted to know.”

And on came the snark, complete with eyebrows. “Right.”

“As fascinating as this conversation is,” Mom put in, sweeping into the kitchen, “I think I’ll ask you to tone it down for Dawn’s sake…” She nodded to the youngest Summers to set down the salad she was carrying. “…And help me finish setting the table.”

Dinner was both awkward and easy, considering the personnel and the subject matter recently broached. Everyone there was pretty comfortable with everyone else. Even Jonathan was good with the group by then. They had invited Andrew, as a matter of course, but he had ended up attending a family thing. Jonathan’s family had apparently left town for the holiday to travel or something, hence his joining them. During the meal, though, he and Willow spent not a little time discussing his family’s apparently far more involved response to Jewish holidays. “You can come to our Chanukah. I mean, I would’ve invited you to our Rosh Hashanah too, but I didn’t know you didn’t have any plans.”

“Well, I mean, yeah, I guess it just never came up. But my family isn’t really very observant. They leave town a lot, and…”

“Well, you should come! My mom does the most amazing latkes. They melt in your mouth. My dad actually makes the kugel. I swear, it’s to die for!”

“I… Okay. Um…” Willow blushed a little. “Could… Could Tara come? Would they be okay with that? I’d… like her to get to know…”

“Oh, sure. They’re fine with… Yeah. Totally.”

“O… okay.” Willow turned to Tara, sounding suddenly kind of excited. “You might really like kugel. It’s this sweet egg noodle thing with cinnamon and sour cream and butter; kind of a casserole, but… Well, okay. It’s super fattening, but it’s sooo good…”

“It sounds good, sweetie.” Tara covered her hand, smiling. “I’d like to try it.” And she lifted her eyes to meet Jonathan’s hopeful gaze. “Thank you for the invitation, Jonathan.”

“Of course!”

Aside from the whole, ‘Hello,  _ Jewish!’ _ thing during Christmas, Willow had never really made a big deal about that part of her life. Buffy found herself startled now by how much her friend seemed to be relating to Jonathan over it, but maybe… Was it because Wil was always surrounded by non-Jewish people, so none of them knew what she was talking about? /Or… But she always seems so into the Wicca thing now, like it’s a religion. I thought she… switched./ 

But maybe she could do both. Because it seemed like this was more of… almost a cultural thing, with the food and the holidays and… And it seemed really big for her. She was blooming over having someone to talk to about it. And very suddenly Buffy was super glad that Jonathan was part of the group, for more reasons than just because he was good at magicks stuff. 

Wil had apparently really needed this, and they had just never known it.

“So, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Mom put in over the cranberries, “what you’ve been doing about the housing situation in this town. Because I have to tell you, it’s really been weighing heavily on my mind since I learned how some of the peaceful demons live. And Buffy, you have pull with both sides, right? Or do you? And Spike, you’re the… what’s it called? The Master?”

Spike choked over his mug of blood, which was impressive considering he didn’t need to breathe. “Ah, yes, Mum, but it isn’t as if…” His eyes jerked to Buffy’s, lost. 

/Oh, man./ So much for hoping it wouldn’t come up. “Mom, you tell me how I can make demons be citizens with equal housing rights, so I can convince the realtors and lender-guys to give them access to empty houses and home loans from the banks, and I’ll get right on it.”

Mom stared at her for a sec, then sighed and dropped her hands, her fork and butter knife clinking to her plate. “I just hate to think of kids, babies, living in awful waterfront warehouses and condemned buildings with no electricity or water, because they have no access to better housing… just because they happen to be demons.”

Xander frowned as if the thought had never occurred to him before. “Huh. I forgot demons probably have kids.”

“Seriously, Xander?” Anya looked ready to whap her boyfriend with a spoon.

Buffy focused on her half-eaten casserole, her food rumbling uneasily in her belly. “I think Mayor Wilkins maybe helped them sometimes…” /Before he decided to turn himself into a giant snake, and to heck with his constituency./ “…But he’s long-gone, so the best I can do now is talk to the few real estate agents who are in the know and are tired of having empty apartments. And yeah. I know a few cops; but I think you think I have more pull in the world than I really do.”

Silence pervaded. Anya broke it. “Buffy and Spike have really helped a lot in the last year, Joyce. Demons have a great many more rights in this town than they had previously. For one, they walk the streets at night without fear of their lives, and can openly bear arms. Buffy doesn’t kill on sight anymore, and no longer assumes guilt without due cause.”

Buffy winced. /You’re not helping, Anya./ “Uh, which is mostly because Spike explained a lot of things to me that… That I was doing wrong before…”

“Which, before you get upset at the Slayer, Joyce,” Spike jumped in, “that soddin’ Council fair brainwashes these chits. Turns ‘em into weapons, makes ‘em think the only good demon is a dead demon, and that we’re all a load of great, soulless, brainless monsters without feelings; not a one of us willing to do anything but maim and kill, and every one of us out to off her at every moment. Since she’s changed tacks and tried to parlay with the ones she meets before the fights begin…” He halted, choosing his words carefully. “Well, I’m not about to sugar-coat it for you, Mum. There’re still loads of demons out there who’d love to do her in. Who live for a good fight to the death, or to eat babies or what have you. Even if they wouldn’t normally, the hellmouth drives us all a bit mad. Buffy’s never gonna be out of work, patrolling the Boca. But it makes a big difference if the little fish know she’s not out spoiling for a fight with them, and it saves her energies for the big fish.”

Mom sat back, a little paler than she was before. “I suppose I asked for that.”

Buffy reached out with one hand, feeling nauseous. “I didn’t want you to know that…” /Dammit./ “I still have to be careful. I try to negotiate, but I have to be ready for it to go sour at any second. I go down to Willy’s and stop fights, and make deals, and stop the bad ones from going down, and make sure everyone knows we’re working together. Spike lays down the law in my name. It’s going… really good. In some ways it’s a lot easier than it used to be. Less constant fighting, more… I dunno. Politics. But…” She bit her lip. “If… No,  _ when _ the Council finds out I’m not doing it the way they want me to, they’re gonna come here and try to set me straight. And when they find out about me and Spike…” She left that hanging, shifted to another track. This was  _ Mom _ . “This relationship, all of it. It’s unforgivable to them. Being friendly with demons is unacceptable. I’m over here not toeing the party line, and they’re gonna want to…” Spike’s hand, tight in her own. “…To have a Slayer who will. Because to them I’m just a tool, and the only thing they want me for is anti-demon genocide.” /And that, my friends, is Thanksgiving conversation at its finest./

Mom went very, very still. “This Council. The one that… that insisted that you get locked… in that abandoned house with that… that one insane vampire who kidnapped me…”

“Kralik,” Buffy whispered.

Beside her, Spike gave a jerk, and a rush of absolute rage poured through her from his side of the link. Out of nowhere his fingers were punching incredibly hard into her thigh, so that she had to peel them off her leg, staring at him. /What the hell?/

“…The Council that sent those… Those  _ men _ after Faith…”

“The wetworks guys, yeah…” /Spike, what…/

Mom’s tones went steely. “They’re coming here.”

Attention dragged back to her mother, Buffy felt her voice drop to a whisper. “That’s, um, why Giles isn’t here. He’s trying to run interference. But probably soon…”

Mom rose to her feet. Pivoted on her heel. And strode out of the room to head for the phone. 

Buffy was at a loss. “Mom, what are you…”

“I’m calling Rupert back.” 

/Oh God…/

Spike was on his feet. “Ah, Joyce? It’s about one in the morning in London at the mo’…”

“I don’t care what time it is. Rupert didn’t tell me my daughter and my son-in-law are in danger from these  _ assholes _ he works for…”

_ “Mom!” _ Buffy exclaimed. The last time she had ever heard her mother curse like that was during the divorce, and she had spent probably five hours apologizing to her daughters, repeatedly, afterward. 

Dawn, sitting at her place at the table with awe—and a little bit of gravy—all over her face, suddenly grinned, delighted. “Oh my  _ God _ , Mom is going to hand those old tweedy guys their  _ butts!” _

Buffy was beginning to be very, very afraid that that was exactly what was about to happen. And the idea of her mother becoming an enemy of the Council scared her far more than anything else those old jerks could ever do to her or Spike.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Gah.  
Anyhoo.   
  
Please tell me it didn't tip too far over that edge!   
Ugh.   
  
Also, I have a vast theory on the language of Spike and his 'how many knees does he take', and a very good reason for why he took two in this scene, but we'll get to that later; along with more historic sharing, of course, so that they know more of each other's issues and can evade future emotional landmines, because those are *owwwchhhh*


	25. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wolf_shadoe continues to be awesome, for being patient with me as I slowed down immensely in this fic while I wandered off to go do other things for a month (prequel, challenge fics, etc). Love to wolf_shadoe! Love to all of you! You rock!
> 
> Off we go into... Well, the parts of 'Shadow' that are worth talking about, thank you very much, because the rest of it can piss off, we've dealt with it, goodbye, don't let the door hit you on the way out, tumor!

Giles returned to Sunnydale in a panicked flurry, all freaked out and ranting—as much as Giles could ever be said to rant—about the Council, who were apparently on their way and loaded for bear. Or, well, Slayer. Buffy, specifically. Which, of course, meant that it was time to hit high gear right away. Do not pass conversational ‘Go’, do not spend a bunch of time updating the Watcher on a bunch of miscellaneous Thanksgiving gossip. He would find out all the stuff that went down while he was gone in the midst of the prep. 

Except, before they could do anything much about the Council’s upcoming hostilities, something  _ else _ went down. Something blonde, finally. Blonde… and scaly, because, of course, this was the hellmouth, and why not stir in some weirdness on top of the standard what-the-hell.

Giles was just getting updated on things Magic Box related—most of said update involved explanations as to why so much of the bottom line had been lost cleaning up after a massive troll-attack—and to be fair, that was probably why he was all absent-minded guy when it happened. He had no way of knowing that his sale was part of the blonde bitch sitch till after. But apparently Anya read his sales receipts right after his last transaction and completely blew up at him, gave him this whole lecture about how he’d sold two highly dangerous thingamabobs together to somebody, and how could he be that dumb.

The upshot was, they called Buffy in a panic a few minutes later, Giles already stammering. ‘Ah, Buffy? We may, ah, have a problem…’

Buffy, who had had to step out of class to answer the call, was not amused. “Great. Color me overjoyed that we have a problem on top of our already huge, incoming issue. Unless you’re gonna tell me that this is a related problem to our already existing problem? The one with the bunch of jerky old men on their way over here to try to wap me over the head, ‘reeducate’ me, and stake my guy?” And okay, maybe she was a little bitchy at the moment, but that tended to happen when you were facing the prospect of a visit from the dudes who, during their last social call, had intended to assassinate you while in the body of your opposite number, and prior to that had thrown you into a deserted house, drugged and helpless, with an insane vampire who had kidnapped your mother for torturous and possibly sexually-perverted purposes. 

‘Ah, unfortunately, no. I’m very sorry to say that a, ah, young woman came in here, to the, ah, shop just now and, ah, bought a couple of items that might prove… quite terribly dangerous…’

Buffy wasn’t sure why this was her problem. “Okay? So, put on all your witchy hats, do a locator spell, find her, stop her from summoning the whatever from whichever dimension before she ends the world as we know it.” Buffy was already turning around to head back into class before she got docked. Her Spanish prof was so not the type to be chill about stepping out for a phone call. “You called me out of class for  _ that? _ Seriously, Giles. That’s your department, and I have finals to get ready for!” 

‘Ah, yes, well, the problem is, we think the woman was, ah, possibly the one who attacked you and Spike…’

A _frisson_ ran through Buffy, freezing her where she stood. “You  _ what?” _

‘Well, the items she purchased were… very particular…’

‘A Khul's amulet and a Sobekian bloodstone,’ Anya put in from somewhere off in the background. She sounded highly satisfied to be tattling on Giles. ‘Not something  _ I  _ would sell to anyone, I’d just like to point out. Not  _ together _ , anyway.’

‘Yes, Anya, you’ve made us all very aware that I’ve made a dreadful mistake, thank you,’ Giles cut her off, sounding tried.

‘Because they can create a monster…’

/Oh, shit./ “What kind of monster, exactly?” Buffy cut in, doing her best to keep to steady, if stern, tones. /So much for Spanish class./ And she really was just starting to get the hang of the future tense conjugation thing.

‘Well, ah… I believe it might be best not to speculate exactly what she might be capable of with these items, since the Sobekite transmogrification spells have been lost for thousands of years. And in order to use the Khul’s amulet as a conduit, the sort of power one must channel…’

Buffy exhaled hard through her nose. “How did she make it out of the store with these things, anyway? Did she…” A fairly worrying thought occurred to her, way too belatedly. “She didn’t beat anyone up, did she, or…”

‘Oh, no. Thankfully, no, no uh, violence to speak of.’

The information slowly percolated through Buffy’s brain. “So, wait. You just…  _ sold _ her these things and then… she  _ left? _ And no one tried to  _ stop _ her?”

A heavy sigh from the other end of the line. ‘Well, it isn’t as if I knew who it was, did I? And anyway, as I said, I really rather doubt she can use them to…’

‘If she found the incantations from the original cult, she can use them,’ Willow’s voice broke in, and why the heck wasn’t  _ Wil _ in class? 

Buffy controlled herself with an effort. “Okay, tell me about this cult. What were they up to? What kind of monster am I about to have to fight?”

‘They… they were Egyptian,’ Tara jumped in, barely stuttering, helpful and enthusiastic, and also completely not in class, and, just, /Am I the only one who even  _ tries _ to go to college anymore?/ ‘An offshoot of the cult of Set. The Temple of Sobek. They vanished a few thousand years ago. No one knows what happened to all their dark magick rites and spells, but we do know that Sobek was a reptile demon. You know, because, Setites…’

‘Just once I would like to run into a cult of bunny worshipers,’ Xander broke in, sounding distant and tinny.

‘Great. Thank you very much for those nightmares!’ All satisfaction had summarily fled from Anya’s voice.

‘Sorry, Honey.’

‘Anyway,’ Anya testily took up the info-dump, ‘their high priest, Khul, had great mystic powers. He forged an amulet using a transmogrifying crystal…’

‘Transmogrifying,’ Wil put in, ‘is changing a living thing into a different kind of thing.’

Giles took up the account then. ‘We, ah, have managed to decipher the markings that were on the bloodstone that I sold… That she left with. Uh, cobra. She's going to transmogrify a cobra.’

Buffy had had enough. Time to cut to the chase. “Okay, so she's making a monster. What for? What does it do?”

Giles cleared his throat very audibly. ‘That’s… Ah… We’re working on it.’

Buffy lost what remained of her patience. Class was pretty much over anyway. She’d lost at least half the day’s participation points. Being the Slayer sometimes just made her feel like that Sissy guy Spike told her about, pushing a school-shaped rock up a mountain. “Well, you keep working on it. I'll go kill it.” She made to hang up.

‘Ah, shouldn’t you at least wait until you can take Spike along?’

/Shit./ He really would be pissed off if she didn’t at least let him know she was going back up against the bitch. “It doesn’t sound like I have a whole lot of time.” /Definitely not enough to wait till dusk…/

‘Buffy, this chick creamed you last time,’ Xander put in, totally unhelpfully, and what? Had they lost all faith in her ability to slay without backup since Spike joined the picture?

“That's because we weren't ready for her last time. I am now. I got this,” she told them, and willed herself to believe it, willed the heavy, uncertain rock in her stomach to dissolve.

‘But…’ Wil began.

Buffy cut her off ruthlessly, irritated by her own doubt. “Will, I can't just sit here. I have to do something!” /This is  _ Dawn _ , dammit!/ She did get their point, and not that they knew that, but… /Shit./ “But I swear. I’ll call Spike, let him know where I’m headed, at least.” She dropped her voice to a low mutter. “I mean, if I don’t he’ll probably un-propose or something.”

‘Beg pardon?’ Giles’ voice, popping back in over the line, sounded startled as hell.

Oh, right. They hadn’t let her Watcher in on the engagement update yet. 

Well, no time for gossip now. “Get the 411 on that from the group, Giles,” Buffy put him off ruthlessly. “I gotta run. Got a blonde psycho to stop.” And she hit ‘end’ before he could demand she give him more engagement-related details. After all, it just really wasn’t the time for Society Column stuff when there was a slaying emergency to get to. 

/Okay. Cobras. If I wanted to find a cobra, in Sunnydale, where would I go?/

Probably there were a few idiots who bred them, she supposed, or kept them as pets. But they would be black market, right? As far as she knew there weren’t any being sold in, like, PetCo or the mall. /Cobras are poisonous, right?/ That kind of thing was usually more of a special collections sort of animal, like you’d have at…

/Oh. Joy. I have to go back to the Zoo, don’t I?/

It was about ten and a quarter miles to the zoo from campus. The next bus was fifteen minutes out from the campus hub to downtown, and then she had no idea when her next bus out toward zoo road would be. But… /Oh, right./ There was always a bus out toward the Greyhound depot. That would at least get her three-quarters of the way there. She was pretty sure the last stop on that line would drop her off out there somewhere by Shady Hill Church. Probably that was her best bet, since if she called Spike instead he’d be there in half the time, but he’d also insist on trying to figure out a way to walk from the damn parking lot all the way across the whole stupid zoo to the reptile area with her, like he wouldn’t go up in smoke, and that was just not going to be happening on her watch. /Why the  _ hell _ did I give you that Amara ring, Angel?/ she thought, angrily and for about the nine hundredth time as she piddled away the fifteen minutes till the next number three bus alongside the other students leaving campus.

The bus ride left her in a welter of irritation, jiggling all over, but it did save her a little time. Even a Slayer couldn’t run all the way across town faster than the bus could drive it; though she did seriously consider jumping off to race the stupid thing by about the fifth stop. Short-term, she could have beaten it. At a sprint, she would’ve won that race, easy. That, or if she was going to a place the buses didn’t. Campus to Willy’s? Running was the best bet, there. But this… 

Ten miles was a motorized game. Especially if she wanted to show up fresh for the fight.

/Especially if I end up guessing wrong and have to come all the way back and look somewhere else for this bitch./

Twenty minutes later found her jogging along that one burnt-out development out by Zoo Road, every sense cast out about her, seeking for evil blonde-bitchness. She was just about to turn down the little avenue that led to the Zoo itself when she saw him; the teenage Ano-Movic kid, poking his head out of the door to one of the run-down houses opposite the burnt ones she passed. 

She slowed automatically. Maybe he could save her some time. Maybe he’d seen something. “Hey… Simon, right?”

Simon pulled his head back a little, preparatory to vanishing. “Uh… hey.”

“No, don’t… I’m… I’m looking for someone in particular, who might’ve passed this way recently? A blonde chick? Maybe wearing a red dress.”

The scarlet-tinted countenance slowly eked its way back out of the shadowed door frame. “Uh, yeah. She, uh, passed by a little while ago, Slayer. She, uh, had a friend.”

/Well, damn./ That made things less fun. “What kind of friend, Simon?” Buffy fought to keep her voice away from the stern end of the register, though. No reason to intimidate her already-squirrely informant. The kid, after all, couldn’t be more than sixteen, and was probably dealing with enough cognitive dissonance as it was in his young life when it came to things Slayer, what with how quickly everything had changed.

Hopefully, though, he was still young enough to be open-minded.

Simon hesitated briefly, then, “Uh, he was this little…” The kid glanced back over his shoulder, like he yearned to duck back inside the house, or like he was afraid he’d get caught by someone conversing with the Slayer. “Look, if you’ve seen  _ Spaceballs _ , he looked like those guys who hung around the Great Yogurt; only with leprosy.”

/Ooookaaaay. Apparently I need to watch more dumb nerd movies./ “So, like… Can you give me a description? Short or tall? Warlike?”

Simon shot her an odd look. “Robes. Kinda short. Ugly, no weapons. Kind of… monk-ish?”

Buffy frowned. “Robes could mean magicks.” Which definitely fit in with the whole, ‘about to do a weird, ancient dark magicks rite. And it told her something important; to wit, blonde bitch couldn’t do her own hocus pocus. /Good to know./ 

Simon must’ve heard something fairly deadly in her voice. He went all uncertain-mouse and drew back again. 

/Keep it chill./ “Okay. Thanks, Simon.” Giving him a civil nod, she turned and headed off at a trot.

“Uh, hey, Slayer?”

Halting, Buffy swung back. Maybe he had remembered something else. “Yeah?”

“Uh, be careful? She… uh, the chick? Had, like, a big mojo feel. The Master can’t fight in daylight with you and everyone knows it. Bet she does too, or she wouldn’t’ve gone to do whatever at this time of day…” 

Buffy frowned as she nodded and turned away to head off down zoo road. /Yeah, or she doesn’t care, because she thinks we’re no big deal./ 

Still, the Movic kid’s reminder was apropos. She wasn’t on the noisy-ass bus anymore, and she wasn’t yet in the stealth section of her sneak-attack, which meant she was out of excuses.

Besides; Spike probably suspected something by now just from reading her vibe. He definitely wouldn’t be sleeping anymore, with her buzzing like this.

With a sigh, she pulled out her phone and opened it. 

And, predictably, saw a text waiting for her, missed during the raucous period spent in transit. ‘Wt th fucks on, Slayr?’ it demanded.

Spike had taken to texting all too quickly, for a century-old vampire. Damn him. 

She put the phone to her ear, punched the ‘send’ button. Might as well get the uncomfortable conversation over with. “Hey.”

‘Slayer, what the bloody fuck.’

“You can get the full update from the gang. I’m at the zoo. I think blonde-bitch is maybe there, trying to turn a cobra into some kind of ancient Egyptian whatever to use against us…”

Silence, then, ‘Christ, Buffy…’

“I can handle a snake, Spike. And, according to that Ano-Movic kid, Simon, I guess also some little guy with leprosy, in robes, who looks he was in, um,  _ Spaceballs? _ ”’

‘Oh, because ancient Egyptian magicks, and soddin’ cobras, and monk-types is such a great bloody combination. Fuck, pet…’

“I promise I’ll call you after and make sure you know I’m alive?”

She heard a crashing noise. He’d punched something in the crypt. Probably broken it. “Don’t smash any more urns. I don’t want to come home and have to dust off the couch again before I snuggle with you.”

‘If you get yourself fucking killed, Buffy, I’ll bloody well drain you.’

Affection filled her, warmed her soul. Unlike everyone else in the group, he never forgot that she was the damn Slayer. That once she had made a decision, there was no sense gainsaying it. He supported her, no matter how loudly his instincts might be screaming at him to blast over here and try to protect his mate. 

Whatever else they were to each other, when she was in general mode, he stepped back automatically to the spot he had carved out as her left-hand guy and most-trusted lieutenant. And god, did she ever love him for it. “I know. I’ll do my best to make sure you never have to follow through on that.”

‘You’d better. Maddening bint.’ A tight silence. ‘I’m gonna ring off and go break a few things and curse the soddin’ sun till I hear from you again.’

“Okay.” Breathing through her nose, she hit ‘end’… and wished like hell she could turn back time, just once. /Just a couple weeks difference, dammit, and I would’ve known which vampire to give that damn ring to. Shit./ 

Why the hell Angel had decided to smash the stupid thing was still beyond her. /If you didn’t want to take the risk and keep it, you could always have just given it back to me, you jackass./ 

She couldn’t have imagined, a few days before she’d handed the gaudy thing over, wishing like hell that Spike had managed to maintain his grip on it, or been successful in his attempt to regain it from his grandsire. Though, granted, if he had, he would never have been taken down by the damned Initiative, much less the Hellions, and who knew how much longer it would’ve taken the two of them to end up making googly-eyes at each other. But still. /Dammit!/

The Sunnydale Zoo was a brightly-lit maze of people at this time of day. Buffy paid the pittance required to get through the turnstile—money she could ill-afford, but she could even less afford having security called on her to slow her down—then thrust her way through and around the jostling crowds and the peanut- and popcorn-sellers to jog around the winding asphalt paths, the informational signs with the fanciful animal-faces describing the environments of the Galapagos and Madagascar, the overhanging sprays of bamboo and willow; past the shark house, the freshwater aquarium doors, the elephant and camel and big cat sanctuaries—which would actually be interesting to visit again sometime, post-Slayer-dream—and, with a brief shudder, the hyena exhibit, till she found the cave-like reptile habitat.

As she edged close to the stucco overhang that was the door and passed the horizon into cool shade, she could hear them. A male voice, chanting in some foreign, dark-magick-y sounding tongue… and over the top of it, a familiar woman’s voice, all-too-perky and enthused, saying some crap about how, ‘Sobek’ should grant her the power to mold some ‘wretched creature’ to be reborn, and crap like that. Blondie broke off after a second, though, to complain that “dark incantations were always overwritten,” and started bitching about how they should just cut to the…

“Fight?” Buffy supplied, crashing full-force into the bitch, and slammed her broadside into the stucco wall of the enclosure. Red-lit snake homes flashed past her awareness, their small, windowed habitats a welter of branchy, leafy impressions. Buffy ignored them as she focused on simply doing as much damage as she possibly could in as short a period as possible. Maybe if she did, she could leave little to no time for blonde-bitch to retaliate with one of her insanely-powerful strikes in return. 

Kick to the face. To the belly. 

“No fair… attacking…”

Punch to the stomach. To the face…

“…When I wasn’t even looking!”

Grabbing her head, Buffy slammed it into the wall. Gratifyingly, the bitch actually said, “Ow!”

It was heartening.

Accordingly, she smashed the bitch’s face into the wall a couple more times (the ho kept up a steady stream of complaints the entire time about how her ambush was an unfair tactic, which, bitch, please). 

But then, as if she was simply toying with Buffy the entire time, she straightened, grabbed Buffy’s hand… and out of nowhere, completely took command of the previously-one-sided fight. 

Somehow, while things remained one-sided, Buffy ended up on the other side as blonde-bitch just straight-up peeled her hand off, grabbed Buffy’s head in turn, and slammed her right into the wall. 

“No, this is no good,” the ho put in… and Buffy was reeling with the force of it. Being slammed headfirst into a wall like that… 

She had hit with the force of a wrecking ball. Her nose felt like it had exploded. Her eyes were deep wells of agony, her jaw felt like it had ripped into her ears, her brain was rattling…

Somehow, almost on sheer instinct, she stiffened, fought to swing around; managed a bleary punch. Missed. The blonde blur had her arm, dragged it behind her, held it in an incredibly painful hold that was this close to dislocation. And tugged down, over and behind her own shoulders. 

Buffy gasped and stood on her tiptoes, because  _ fuck _ , this bitch was strong.

Blonde bitch was still talking. Buffy couldn’t really hear her anymore as she took another punch to the face from which she couldn’t escape... and was slammed face-first back into the wall. And the entire time, she remained essentially helpless to strike back. And the entire time, the bitch was complaining that Buffy was interrupting her spell without contributing anything, and yelling impatiently at her toady to keep chanting, and god, /Why the hell did I go after her again? I should've gone after monk-guy first, stopped the ritual that way. What the hell was I  _ thinking? _ /

Because after that, Buffy was sorry to admit, the fight was over. The problem was, whether she wanted to admit it or not, she was completely outclassed by this bitch; more so than she had been since she had been a mere slaying infant, thralled going up against the Master. 

Somewhere, off in the vague distance, the warty little dude doing the spell was breathing some kind of obedient, worshipful reply. Buffy thought she caught, “Yes, Glory!” before he resumed his creepy mojo-work. Tough to tell through the ringing ears and the roaring while Buffy reeled, stunned and contused, from one blow to the other. 

And then, because this ‘Glory’ really seemed to like throwing her, she did it again, across the ‘cave’, to smack hard up against a far wall, and what was  _ with _ that move?

Buffy slid slowly to the floor, brain staggered. /Fuck, I should’ve waited for backup./ She hadn’t had had her ass so thoroughly handed to her in an exceedingly long time. It was very much with the suck. And, it  _ hurt _ . She could barely breathe; and it didn’t look to stop soon, since her mind was reeling too hard to figure out a getaway.

“Hey! Hey! Work with me here!” her enemy screeched on in her high-pitched, irritating voice, and dragged Buffy up for a further ass-kicking. 

It was possibly the most helpless feeling Buffy had experienced since… 

Wow. Since her Cruciamentum. 

There was literally not a damn thing she could do right now to protect herself from being beat all to shit by this crazy bitch. Nothing she could do, even, to block the devastating blows. It was almost insult to injury the way, the whole damn time, the bitch kept yapping, because it made it abundantly clear that she took Buffy not remotely seriously.

/I walked right into this one. She’s probably gonna kill me right now, and to her it’ll be like killing a fly. She won’t even care./

/God… I’m so sorry, Spike./

He would feel it. He’d come racing over here to avenge her; probably burn himself up trying. And then Dawn would be without a protector… /No. You have to stay… For her. For me, you have to… Please./ 

‘Glory’ was lifting her to her feet again. She got a nice knee to the face. “That feels more real, don’t you think?” Felt some air, struck another wall. Everything was starting to feel kind of far away, actually.

It was weird to realize she was now staring at approaching death, upside-down. She gasped for breath, automatically, through lungs that didn’t work right, as the heeled personage approached, inverted. Grabbed her by the throat, shutting down that trickle to her already labored airway. Without even that tiny vestige of oxygen, things closed down to a dim, fuzzy-edged tunnel. 

She floated from something tight. There were more taunting words. Then she had some more oxygen, for a second, was dimly aware she was flying again. Through… glass, this time? There was a tinkling, and some sharp, cutting sensations, and then…

She thought she fetched up against something hard, something that snapped under the impact of her fall. Other senses slowly trickled back in. Smell; she was in a space that smelled funny. Sensation; the space felt overly warm, and moist. No hearing yet; but none of it mattered, because,  _ fuck _ , she hurt. Pretty much everywhere, and she should be getting up to go back and try again, and probably, maybe, she should have just waited for the snake-thing to happen instead of trying to stop it, because what had she been  _ thinking, _ trying to take this bitch again? /I should’ve  _ known _ better, how could surprise have helped when she’s… God, why is she so  _ strong _ , what  _ is _ she?/

Except that was what Buffy was supposed to do, what the Slayer was  _ supposed _ to do; stop evil plots before they took off, not let the big bads do their evil deeds and  _ then _ stop the evil plots  _ afterward _ , mid-plottyness…

Auditory information was drifting slowly back in to inform her, piecemeal, that the background noise of non-stop chanting had resolved to one word. It was punctuated, distantly to Buffy’s ears, by her enemy’s gratified, “Arise…”

Then, after a long moment, a slightly more impatient, “Arise!” and finally, irritated, “ARISE!”

There was a sound, like a porcelain exploding or something, and a growling hiss took up all the air in the room. 

“He is arisen!” the warty little guy murmured in awe.

“About damn time!”

Forcing herself to roll ponderously over, Buffy squinted mazily at the scene of her defeat. And, well, damn. That was one big freaking snake. Like, man-sized, plus-tax. 

Definitely not something she could fight right now, the shape she was in. 

Time to bail, regroup…

/Shit, Spike’s gonna kill me./

Tumbling out of the… snake cage? Buffy crawled painfully to her feet, shards of glass dropping from her clothes to ping to the floor. Abruptly aware that she might even have a fracture in one femur, she staggered painfully for the exit. Her head was ringing so badly she almost didn’t hear Glory’s closing statement. 

“The power is yours, to see what is unseen. To find what is shrouded in shadow. Already, you know what I seek. I have given you form… Now find for me the Key! Seek for me…”

/Shit, shit, shit…/

Outside, limping in near-agony, Buffy made her slow way for the park’s exit and the bus stop outside the Zoo’s marquee. She would need to get her leg x-rayed, probably, a thought which filled her with mild terror. Would they even  _ do _ that on that cheap version of ‘insurance’ that came with her college tuition? 

And she needed Spike on Dawn, stat. 

Too many fears, colliding.

He was already calling as she dragged herself past the lion-info sign. ‘Buffy, tell me I don’t need to get in the bloody car right the fuck now to come to you…’

“You need to get to Dawn. Get her out of school. I’ll call them.” She found herself biting off the instructions sharply, hoarse with pain. “Get her somewhere you can hide her. Go deep. Find some cave or some freakin’ thing; some place smelly where you think some Sobek snake demon won’t be able to sniff her out…”

‘Fuck.’

“Yeah. I was about as useful against this bitch as Dawn would be against you. I need to call Giles and Co and get them on research detail ASAP, since we at least have a name now…”

‘What the hell is the bitch called, Slayer?’

“Glory. Have you heard of her?”

Spike’s tones were livid. ‘Pet, you’d know already if I had.’

/Right./ “Sorry. I’m not thinking clear. She rung my bell pretty hard. I think…” Stagger. “I think she maybe cracked my leg, too.”

‘Bloody fuck, love. I’m coming for you as well…’

/ _ No! _ What the…/ “You’re bringing Dawn nowhere near her! And she’s the priority right now! I’ll be fine. Dammit, Spike!”

A short, frustrated silence. She could  _ feel _ how incredibly torn he was. ‘Christ, Buffy…’

“Please. I need you to be my partner right now, not my mate.” She winced hard as she came down the wrong way on the leg and almost pitched forward onto her face. Heard him curse over the line, knew he’d felt her pain slice through him. “I’ll find you, okay?”

When he answered, it was in a taut whisper. ‘You’re tearin’ me to pieces, love.’

“I know. But I need you. Dawn needs you.” /We need you to fight every instinct you have right now. It might save all of us./

‘Right.’ She could hear him exhale hard; heard his sharp, panting breaths as he got control of himself, put intellect and loyalty before impulse and instinct. ‘Be sure you phone those cretins who call themselves schoolmasters, Slayer, or they won’t let her go into my care.’

He was trying for a hard, snarky, almost jocular tone, as if to convince himself he was up to this. She couldn’t blame him for that, since they both knew what she was asking him. 

There was no doubt he would do it, too. Put himself before Dawn, even if it came down to dusting; just as he would for her. /God, I love you./ “You better be in one piece when I show up.”

A harsh snort. ‘You’re one to bloody talk.’

Rounding the corner beyond the gift shop, she was pushed wearily through the promised land of the garish, turquoise-painted turnstile that was the exit. Beyond that, several green-painted wrought-iron benches in a circular area before a large turnout that hosted buses, shuttles, taxi stops. 

She fell to the nearest bench with vast relief, leaned back to let the weak winter sun blaze through her eyelids. Everything cut to a veiny red light, edged in black and pulsating, and maybe with Slayer healing she would do well enough with the college clinic. Man, things were better back when she had been on Mom’s insurance, but her mother couldn’t afford her regular hospital trips anymore. Not that she had been able to even back then, but slaying was far more dangerous now that the insurance could no longer cover Buffy as an adult dependent. And injuries looked to be a regular feature these days, with this whole Glory thing, which meant leaning a lot on the UC clinic system; at least til they told her she couldn’t come back anymore. “I know. I promise,” she whispered, “I’ll get checked out first.” 

‘Go to hospital, pet, if you think you’ve a fracture. I’ll find a way to pay for it, or help Mum to. That bloody sad little clinic on campus isn’t set up for the kind of injuries you get slaying.’

“Spike…” God, she was exhausted. It was a damn effort to hold the phone up. Fighting with him over money stuff was…

His voice went all harsh; harsh enough she could feel his anger over their link. ‘Just bloody go. We’ll figure it. You know Mum would agree.’

/Dammit./ Closing her eyes, she gave in; to everything. Shoved the phone between ear and shoulder, leaned her cheek over hard… and just for a moment, let her bruised arm, her tattered knuckles fall heavily into her lap. “Okay,” she breathed finally, and just gave up, for a moment. “Can you dial the school for me after you hang up?” It was an impossible request, but a girl could dream.

‘No,’ he told her softly, and she could hear him grabbing keys and rustling around the crypt, ‘but I’ll update the research biddies ‘fore I dash.’

“I really love you.”

Something slammed. Probably the inside door to the sewer access deal. The connection went abruptly fuzzy. ‘After this is over I’m not letting you out of bed for a week.’

It sounded damned nice, but… “Probably the Council will be here before that.”

A heavy sigh, blipping in and out of their now-rotten connection. He was going to cut out at any second. ‘Mind, if you just let me drain the lot, pet, you wouldn’t even have to deal with them.’

Sunlight soaked through her, balming despite the bad-tooth throbbing of her leg, her head, and everything in between. Her right shoulder was a wreck. Basically her entire body was a bruise. “I might… consider it right now. I don’t really have the time for the jerks. Though… it’s probably the wrong answer to do the… What’s the story? The one where the guy didn’t want to deal with the knot, so he just whacked it in half with his sword?”

She must have surprised him. He barked out a startled laugh that made him cut out completely for a second. ‘The Council of Wankers bein’ the Gordian knot and I’m your sword, is it?’

“Mmm.”

A short silence, except for what she thought was the echo-y sound of sloshing. ‘Be an honor to be wielded by such a hand as yours, my love. And, of course there’s the added benefit of…’

The connection fizzled out, vanished.

With a sigh, Buffy shifted her chin to let the phone drop into her immobile hand, twitched her fingers fitfully to close the device.

All joking aside, she was well-aware that her vampire would be all-too-willing to simplify their rapidly-complicating world with such a swift solution as draining, maiming, or killing a fair proportion of the Watcher’s Council and their ancillary wetworks members. 

Buffy really wished that her current, exhausted frame of mind didn’t lend itself to some brief, terribly wistful—if slightly guilty—daydreams involving a wink and a nod and a just not wanting to know. /Stop that! Loving a vamp without a human conscience is absolutely no excuse to… To let him do the things your conscience doesn’t let  _ you _ do! Don’t pretend you don’t have one, like he’s…  _ your _ demon!/ 

Though it was… Well, fun wasn’t exactly the right word, but… maybe freeing? Just once in a very blue moon, to wonder what it would be like to be totally-demon-Buffy, and not have to be perfect all the time. To not have to be the law, and her own conscience,  _ and _ his, and…

What would it be like to let  _ loose _ like that?

/Stop! You don’t get to live vicariously through him! Because you  _ do _ have your human soul still, and you know what that would be like! It would be like Faith, and she’s still dealing with what it did to her to cut loose. It messed her up bad, so don’t even fantasize about offing the people you hate.  _ You _ don’t get that luxury!/

Forcing her limp hand to function, she flipped the phone open once more and twitched her exhausted fingers into action. Dragged her eyes determinedly open, and punched in the number for the school. “Just call ‘em,” she instructed herself firmly, “and tell ‘em to let Spike pick up Dawn. Do thing A, then do thing B, then once we deal with the snake, we can deal with thing C. Because there’s  _ always _ something.”

Unfortunately, that was how things went on the hellmouth.

***

Giles was all over her by the time she was at the hospital, holding an ice-pack over her shoulder and waiting for her x-ray to come back. ‘Buffy! Spike phoned. Are you quite alright?’

Sighing, she shifted the cell back to her less-injured shoulder and did the ear-holding thing. “No, I'm really not.” Not much fun to admit it, but, “You guys were right. I didn’t stop the ritual of Sajack. I couldn't even slow her down.” /Why do I  _ do _ that? Why do I mess with his head like that, even when I know the right word for the thing?/ Except at this point it was almost instinct to make Giles think she didn’t have the brain for book-stuff. 

Really, the reason she did it was because if he knew she could retain the mental part of slaying, he might try to tie her down in the library with the research committee, and she quite simply didn’t have the bandwidth. /That’s why I have a team./

Giles, of course, was so used to her pop-culture faux-pas that he let her misnomer slide without bothering to correct her. ‘Where are you?’ he asked instead, all concern.

Buffy shifted the ice pack to a slightly different segment of shoulder. “Sunnydale Memorial.” Maybe if she gave in, scooted back to put the leg up on the gurney till they came back with the results…

She was just glad Mom was more involved now with her slaying life. It meant she didn’t have to hide stuff like this anymore, pretend she wasn’t hurt when she was by avoiding treatment… and medical bills that might show up on her mother’s worried radar. Because, yes, Mom would be concerned when she had to figure out how to cover a bill for an x-ray and whatever-all; but nowadays she’d wait, and ask in even tones, and Spike would be there to back Buffy up… And she could maybe, by then, find some way to explain to her mother that it was all in an effort to protect her younger daughter from some freak named Glory who was out to get her because she was actually a transdimensional key made of energy shaped into a teenaged girl?

Okay, probably better not to mention the last part.

‘Are you badly hurt?” Giles was asking, anxious. “I'll… I'll come right over, take care of the charges and…’

/Oh. Right./ She had utterly forgotten about Giles and the money he had set aside for her; the Slayer-fund that should have covered this sort of thing for years. /Oh, thank God./ What a thought, and what a relief, to know she could get banged up anytime, now, and it wouldn’t be on her and Spike and Mom to try to figure out how to cover it! /That, or I won’t have to just suffer through for days on Slayer-healing and be all stiff-upper-lip, because I can’t afford medical care!/ “Yeah, I mean… That’d be great, and obviously I’d like a ride. I’m going to need to quarter the ground and feel for Spike. I don’t know where he took Dawn…” Shit. She’d just let too much slip. /Dammit, I took way too many hits to the head today to keep everything straight./

Spike was so gonna  _ kill _ her.

There was a short, pregnant pause, because of course Giles was way too damned smart not to catch onto that little slip of the tongue. ‘Buffy, why, pray tell, does Spike have Dawn hidden somewhere so closeted that you would need to sense him to locate them? Is this serpent after her? And if so, why would it be?’

/Shit, shit, shit…/

Another short pause, in which Buffy could almost  _ hear _ her Watcher’s mental gears whirring away, then, ‘The two of you have been keeping a very close eye on Dawn ever since this… Glory person’s come to town, haven’t you. Ever since, essentially, you had the dream…’

Buffy held her silence, while butterflies swooped helplessly in her abdomen.

‘Most especially since you did your meditation, the Couverture ritual.’ His voice went hard. ‘After which you informed me in no uncertain terms that you had gleaned nothing with regard to supernatural evidence that your family was in any way involved in current events…’

Buffy sighed heavily. “Actually, that’s not what I said. What I actually said was that it didn’t work... to show me anything that was hurting Mom. Which…”

_ ‘Buffy…’ _

“Look,” Buffy whispered, harsh over the line, “not over the phone, okay? And besides,” because at that moment the curtain was yanked aside. She expected to see the nurse who had redeposited her in here once they’d returned her from the ex-ray room, but instead, of course, the face she saw was freaking Ben, because the guy absolutely would not give the fuck up. “…I’m gonna have to fight with these guys about why I’m not gonna need a cast.” Which battle would at least maybe be a little easier with this idiot than with some rando RN and signing doc, since Benji here had seen her smack that security guard back down onto his gurney one-handed, like a freak. “Just get over here, and I’ll…” /Dammit./ “I’ll fill you in in person, on the way to where Spike and Dawn are holed up.” And she closed the phone and, giving up, shot the dark-haired, pleasant-faced and permanently-hovering intern a look that was not quite a glare. “You really seem to turn up a lot.”

Ben had the grace to look abashed. He also looked… weirdly frazzled, with his scrubs hanging a little off-kilter on his body, like he’d dressed in a hurry. He had a dirt-smudge on one cheek, and his hair was kind of a mess. “Yeah, well, I, uh… was up on the rotation. And I got to work really late today, which means I get the stuff no one wants to deal with. Not that your case isn’t worthwhile,” he hastened to add, “but…”

Buffy so did not have the time. He was here. She would make it work to her benefit. “Well, since you’re on the case, do me a favor. If this is a fracture, sign off on giving me one of those strap-on-cast things, so I can be out quick. I need to go, and I promise you, if you people insist on giving me the whole plaster thing, I’m out. I…” What to say? “I don’t have the patience for heavy, un-bendy crap. I’m… an athlete.”

A faint smile flickered up and down her body, as if he were giving her an appraisal, then, “I’m not surprised.” With a nod, he sobered and glanced down at the chart in his hand. “Well, luckily it’s not a break; just a really deep bone-bruise. Which isn’t surprising, since basically your entire body is a bruise. What do you do; martial arts?”

Buffy flinched, rifled quickly through her mind for some kind of excuse that would seem valid. “Uh, yeah. Uh, I do Taekwondo, and I, uh, box a little. There’re chick-power boxing rings. Kind of underground. You’d be surprised. And, uh, I skydive. And do gymnastics. The hardcore stuff, like uneven bars, and the pommel horse, and the long jump, and hurdles, and... women’s deadlifting.” /Is that even an event?/ “And… I’m in a Punk band. With my  _ fiancé.” _ She leaned a little harder than was probably warranted on the last word, in case it would make him back off, finally. “I guess I’m kind of an adrenaline junkie…”

Ben blinked at her, looking wholly taken aback. “That’s… a lot of activity. When do you sleep?”

/Ha!/ “Um… Well, I do some of it through my college; so I get credit. And… um… you sleep pretty well when you’re wiped.”

Ben nodded thoughtfully. “Well, it definitely explains why you’re so toned, and how you could wrestle that security guard down without much trouble. And your long list of injuries here in your medical record. And why you’re so confident…” He shot her a warm smile that had a little too much ‘coming on’ around the edges of it, and dammit, he was supposed to be intimidated, not encouraged, by her rundown of lethal, thrill-seeking madness; or at the very least, by the ‘fiancé’ part of the sentence. “Though, if you want my medical advice, getting broken bones on the regular is not really good for you in the long run, and you’ll probably pay for it when you hit middle age…”

/I’m never gonna hit middle age, so we’re chill on that. Also, I didn’t ask./ And did this guy ever give up? /Obviously the stuff I’m supposedly into, and the ‘sports interests’ I have in common with my  _ fiancé, _ are really not stuff you’re into—whether you’re counting the cover story or in real life—so seriously. Quit while you’re ahead, dude./

“In the meantime, you lucked out. None of your current injuries will require any more tending than maybe a lot of ibuprofen…” Another sweet, encouraging smile, and just, le sigh.

Buffy nodded and shoved herself off the gurney with the heels of both hands. Checked her stability on the leg. It already felt better, held more of her weight without feeling about to give out… which led her to believe that the bone had actually been fractured a couple hours ago but had since knit a little while she’d been sitting still and not hiking around on it. /Yay for the good old Slayer healing factor./ Though, not for the first time she found herself wondering if it maybe worked both ways, now she was taking regular nips from Spike. She could swear she healed faster these days than she had before the whole blood-bonding, closed-claim thing. “So, I’m free to go, then?”

“If I were you, I’d slow down on the whole underground kickboxing thing for a few days, but… yeah.” As expected, the dude seemed kind of downcast by her hurry to escape… and maybe hopeful that he could encourage her to shift to a less injury-prone lifestyle or something.

/I am so not here to brighten your afternoon. And I’m definitely not yours to worry about. And Spike’s not a bad influence on me. I’d be this kind of ‘athlete’ whether he was in my life or not. So back. Off!/ “Great. Have a nice day.” Buffy turned to head for the curtained exit, though she’d have to pass around the guy as she did so. He was kind of standing right in the middle of the very small room. Squeezing past him, she sidled toward the crevice between curtain and wall, until he finally got the drift and turned aside to give her better access.

Weirdly, Buffy could swear she smelled something odd on him as she passed. Something… not musky, but off; something that tugged at her brain. She couldn’t quite place it, though. The only thing she could really think of in that impatient moment was that, late for work or no, he really should have taken the time to shower before coming in. 

“Have a good evening, Buffy.”

“Uhuh.” She was seriously getting tired of seeing Intern Ben pop up around every corner. Like, maybe it was time to start avoiding Sunnydale Memorial, tired.

Fifteen minutes later, Giles was pulling up to pick her up at the front doors of the hospital, and Ben was long forgotten. She had a vampire and a little sister to locate.

***

“So it’s loose—it’s a really big snake-thing; not Mayor-big, but it’s pretty lethal-looking—and it’s on the hunt for the… The Key.”

Giles remained silent for a long moment as he guided his shiny new midlife-crisis-mobile around a few corners. When he finally spoke, it was in exceptionally quiet tones. “The Key being…”

Buffy badly wanted to punch something, but she was too damaged to put a fist even through something as malleable as his dashboard. It would hurt too much, and her job right now was to heal as quickly as possible so that she could protect her sister. “Dawn,” she answered instead, blunt and straightforward. And didn’t look at him. He would, after all, be all disappointed-guy that she hadn’t told him, for one, and she just didn’t have the time.

“Dawn,” he repeated finally. His tones were flat with disbelief.

“Look. We didn’t tell you because the less people who know about it, the less people who have to lie about it if that crazy bitch comes at us all and starts interrogating my friends. And anyway, look. Those monks put her with my family, but it wasn’t like they asked my permission, you know? They just slapped a bunch of fake memories on all of us, and…”

She could hear Giles’ teeth grinding from here. “Buffy, that’s ridiculous. It’s patently insane. Dawn is your little sister. I have no idea who spun this ludicrous yarn for you, but…”

“Remember that monk we told you about?” she interrupted wearily. “The one Glory had captive? The one she beat to death up in the warehouse? He said his little group of Dagon boys were the ones who sent her to me, because they knew I’d protect her if I thought she was my flesh and blood.” Buffy frowned. “Or, I guess, if they  _ made _ her from my flesh and blood?” It was kind of tough to work that out in her head, considering.

She gave Giles time to whirl on it. She knew how it felt, after all, to realize that all your memories about a person, about a whole family, were false. Not that it was  _ his _ family, so he probably needed a little less time than she and Spike had needed, but she did give him a couple of minutes. She used the silence to cast about in her… Well. Not her mind. It was more visceral than that. With her  _ being _ , for traces of Spike-ness, seeking out her mate. Felt a pull to the left. “Go that way. He’s over there.” She waved vaguely to the west, where Oak Park petered out over by Miller’s Woods. Plenty of caves out there. Made sense that he’d head that direction. /God, you sure took my instructions literally./ Not that she blamed him. He was probably running on anxiety and fumes right now, ‘all buggered up in the head’, as he would put it, by sunlight and worry. 

“Does your mother know?”

Buffy jerked back to the present to blink at her Watcher, then sighed down into her empty palms. “No. She has no idea.”

She felt Giles nod, more than she really saw it. “Yes, I do rather suppose it’s better that way. Joyce would no doubt have some sort of panic attack if she were to be told that her daughter… isn’t.”

Buffy shook her head grimly, lifted her head to glare at Giles. “See, this is why…” Bit her lip and faced her Watcher down with fierce insistence. “Dawn  _ is _ my sister. You  _ have _ to think of her that way. You can’t change anything about how you look at her, act around her…  _ any _ of it! Okay? I mean, not just because it’ll put Glory onto her! Dawn has no  _ idea _ what she is! She’s completely innocent. It’s not  _ her _ fault these stupid monks did this to her! I mean, to all intents and purposes, they did this to  _ all _ of us, and she’s just a kid who’s as much a victim of hellmouth shenanigans as I am; a kid who got randomly Called to be suddenly supernatural, out of nowhere; so why should she suffer or get treated like she’s a weird… thing, just because…”

Giles flung up one hand to forestall her protective rant. He even winced at her use of the Slayer-centric term, clearly recognizing her over-identification with her sister’s abrupt introduction to the supernatural world. “Yes, Buffy, I understand. You’ve very much made your point. I shall endeavor to treat Dawn no differently than I did yesterday.” He sighed, glanced away. “It will be, I admit, something of an effort to do so, but I will strive.”

/Damn, damn./ Buffy balled up her fists and wished she’d never opened her damn mouth. 

They drove on in silence for a long mile or two, the  _ feel _ of Spike pulling her on. Until… “Here,” she interrupted, calling a halt to the tense outing. /End of the road./

Giles blinked and glanced around him. Oak Park ended, of course, at a turnout filled with parking spaces and concrete guardrail-things to keep people from driving into what passed for forest in Central California. Nodding, he guided the car carefully into one of the empty spaces, then shut it off and glanced at her. “One of the caves, is it?”

Buffy shook her head. “He wouldn’t’ve made it that far.” Stepping out of the car into blazing sunlight, she glanced around her, seeking the closest manhole cover. Found it in a little dip in the asphalt about twenty feet away… within spitting distance of the abandoned DeSoto. 

Striding swiftly over, she laid a loving hand on the rear fin of a vehicle she now considered almost as much hers as her lover’s, then nodded to her Watcher. “You coming, or are you gonna head up the research brigade?”

Giles frowned. “Somehow I rather doubt I’ll be much good in the defensive portion of things. I’ll likely be a much greater help running interference from above. Though…” 

Turning away, he retraced his steps to lean into his car, pushed a button in his dash. His trunk popped open, at which point he jogged solemnly around to duck beneath the rising hatch, yanked out a few long-hafted items. Reappearing, he shot a quick glance around them as if seeking for witnesses. The parking lot, though, was denuded of humanity. With a short nod, he emerged the rest of the way, and, without fanfare lobbed her a sword, then an axe. “Here.”

Buffy caught them, gratefully, as they soared, glinting, across twenty-five feet of space. “Thanks. Glad to know my Watcher comes prepared.”

“Least I could do.” Pushing the trunk shut again, he sidled around the car, back toward the driver’s side, and stepped into the convertible. Taking his seat, he caught her eye with his sober gaze. “Be careful, Buffy. We simply have no idea what we’re up against this time around.”

Well did she know it. “Yeah. Color me happy that right now I probably only have to worry about the big damn snake.”

With a faint, distracted nod, Giles turned his sporty little ride over and backed out of the parking spot without further conversation.

Buffy frowned, and, glancing around to be sure no one was watching, bent to set aside the axe briefly so she could yank up the manhole cover. Not that watching a middle-aged dude toss a young girl a couple of lethal, medieval weapons was normal or anything, but watching said girl then descend to the sewers was probably even weirder. But for the moment, the parking lot remained deserted. Good times.

Once down the standard, moist and slippery ladder, and with the manhole closed to cut off the bright light and heat of the California afternoon, Buffy made good time in the dank dimness. She followed the pull of  _ mate,  _ and reflected as she did that this sort of smelly journey always felt better when it was spent brandishing a weapon in either hand.

Within about a half-mile’s walk, she heard the echoes of familiar voices raised in conversation. At the same time as she began to pick out the occasional word from the confusing mess of repeating babble, the tunnel began to rise, widening from a regular, damp and stanky flood-control pipe to an irregular part of the broadly-natural Sunnydale cavern-system. Rough sandstone predominated, tinged with mildew and mica, and the hairs on her neck began to rise with the nearness of hellmouthy yuck-ness. She was probably about a three-quarters of a mile behind the ruins of the high-school. Not the best place by the standards of avoiding trouble on most days… but from the whole, ‘use the overall vibe of broad, evil buzz to mask who was here, plus nearby smelly sewerness to cloak our scents, plus caves-equal-odors-of-other-denizens’… 

If she was Spike, she would probably have done the same. This had been straight up, pure predator-think. He had done exactly everything he could possibly do to confuse the senses of another demonic predator, going off of precisely what would have confused his own senses if he had been the one hunting Dawnie. 

/And that, my friends, is reason number three-thousand, two-hundred and sixty-four why we are glad we have this particular vampire on our side./ Yeah, they might end up fighting off some other low-life, idiot demon who lived in these caves or the nearby tunnels and smelled little-girl-for-supper. Yeah, there might be some collateral idiocy that came of being so close to the hellmouth. And, all of that was preferable right now to Glory’s snake-thing finding her Key and using her to end the world or whatever.

Buffy rounded another corner, and the bouncing, echoing voices resolved themselves abruptly to something sensible. “…Here for a hike,” Dawn was saying. “I got  _ so _ tired. Of course, Buffy never did. She  _ never _ gets tired.”

“Well, you know. Slayer,” Spike put in, reasonably.

“Yeah. That really sucks sometimes. And, of  _ course _ ,” Dawn went on, whining a little, “Dad was on  _ her _ side, all, ‘C’mon, Dawnie, it’s just a little walk in the woods!’ like he’s Mr. Butch Camping-Guy. I mean, seriously. The most time he ever spent in nature is, like, maybe going to the beach twice a year. Ever. And even then, he never got dirty unless he let us bury him in the sand. He hardly ever even went into the water. But whatever. We walked for, like,  _ ever _ that day. We didn’t even have a… whatsitcalled. A canteen. I was so incredibly thirsty by the time we got back to the car; and then, by that time our sodas were all melted, so they tasted bad—all thin, you know, from the melted ice—and I was  _ starving _ . It was so dumb. Like, he was here for  _ my _ birthday!  _ I  _ was the one turning eleven, not anyone else, so you’d think I would get to choose the event, right?”

Buffy rolled her eyes in exasperation. She remembered the hike in question. Or, at least, it was probably a ‘hike’ from Dawn’s perspective. From hers it had been an easy walk. They had barely gone a mile into the woods. There hadn’t even been any long uphill clips. Not that she was deeply in love with the concept of hiking through the woods as an event or anything, and she agreed that Dad had been reaching by then. /He probably just didn’t want to spend money, and wanted to wear us out so he could get away and go back to LA with his dadly duties dispensed./ 

It had, after all, been the very last time Dad had come for a visit and actually spent any real time with either of them. 

The reality hit Buffy in that instant. The hike in question had probably never happened, which… /God. This is all so insane./ 

“At least he came at all, huh, Niblet?”

A brief pause from Dawn, then, “Yeah, I guess so. Even though I woulda rather gone to Chuck-E-Cheese right about then.”

Spike broke in, teasing. “You’d’ve been right embarrassed if your da had even suggested such a thing to your dignified, eleven-year-old self, pre-teen that you were…”

“Oh, like you know. You weren’t even in the picture then!”

“Fair enough. But I met you a bit after, innit? And you were damnably certain you were over all such things by twelve, yeah? All about the mall, and sleepovers and the like, wasn’t it?”

Dawn’s voice had altered by then, going soft and quiet. “Spike?”

His shifted as well, following hers into compassionate, soft responsiveness. “Yeah, pigeon?”

“Why am I down here?”

/Shit, shit, shit…/

“Told you. Buffy heard some sort of rumor that the newest big bad might come after the family. I’m to keep you protected. She’ll see to it Mum’s made safe with Watcher an’ the band,” he lied easily, “then come down here to check on you…”

“Why didn’t you grab Mom too, bring her down here with us?”

“Spread out the targets. Confuse the opposition.” He was doing his best to make it sound logical, bless his immoral vampire heart. “Anyway, if this snake-thing comes after us, you know we’ll take it on and knock it out. Between the two of us, we have enough fire to take on any ten jumped up snakes…”

“Spike? I really love you. And I’m so glad you’re here.”

Buffy closed her eyes, halted in her trek to lean briefly against the sweating stone of the tunnel wall. The pathos in her sister’s tones sometimes just utterly broke through her every defense. 

“I love you too, Niblet. You’ve no idea how bloody much. Told you before, didn’t I? Summers women are my soddin’ weakness, and you’re no exception.”

Dawn gave a helpless little laugh. “You know you’re setting up some kind of crazy standard for me, right? That I’m gonna have the world’s worst dating life someday, trying to find a guy that’ll even remotely compare to you, after watching you and Buffy.”

“Oh, bollocks. You try to model your love life after the two of us and I’ll drain you.”

Pushing away from the wall, Buffy hid a satirical chuckle behind the back of her hand before lowering the sword she held to trudge on. 

“You have no idea, do you?”

“No idea of what, Platelet?”

“How much she smiles now, compared to with Angel. With him, I swear, she was always crying. I mean, you guys are the same in some ways, with all the passionate, ‘everything’s so intense it’s like life and death at every moment’ deal. And it’s probably partly that you’re so involved in all the hellmouth-y stuff, and you have that… That bond-y thing. Every day’s still like the end of the world in some ways… but it’s different. Instead of getting all… I dunno; worked up over it, she gets… calm.”

Buffy rounded the last corner, saw the two of them sitting on a kind of protrusion in the rock, or maybe it was a tree root, leaning back against the stone wall. Dawn was wearing a strained expression as she attempted to explain something that seemed too much for her vocabulary to handle, while Spike watched her intently and with deep fascination, as if he found her outside view an edge-of-his-seat roller-coaster ride. “I think you’ve been really good for her,” Dawn finished, softly.

Spike smiled and lifted his eyes to take her in as Buffy approached. “I’d like to think we’ve been good for each other,” he answered.

“So do I,” Buffy agreed, and moved to crouch in front of them. Reached out to touch her sister’s knee. “Hey, Dawnie.”

“Hey.” Dawn did her best to look unmoved by all this fanfare and ceremony. “So, what’s the sitch, anyway? Spike said there was some kind of weird giant-snake-thing going around chasing you and anyone related to you, because it thinks you’re hiding some Key-thing from this newest big bad?”

Buffy flicked her eyes briefly to her vampire, who lifted one shoulder and dropped it, as if to say, ‘What? I did my best with what I had.’ Which, she supposed, he had. 

Lying really was easier when you mostly stuck to the facts, and altered things as little as possible. “Yeah… There was a ceremony; the Summoning of Sajack or something…”

Spike snorted dryly in appreciation of her dopey wit.

“…And poof. Giant cobra-bloodhound-thing. I dunno.”

“Creepy.”

“Yeah. Tell me about it.” Getting up, Buffy carefully laid aside her two weapons, then moved around to the other side of the makeshift seat—yeah, it was a tree-root—and nudged her sister with her hip in a bid for more room on the protrusion. “Scoot.”

Dawn scooched over an inch or two to offer her enough space to squeeze in next to them. Buffy settled in, slipped an arm over the youngest Summers’ shoulders, wiggling it in beneath Spike’s so she could lay her hand on his shoulder blade. Dawn promptly settled her head to the inside curve of Buffy’s shoulder and closed her eyes.

They sat there for a long while, just being and offering one another wordless comfort. Occasionally Spike strained Buffy’s way to lay a light kiss on the top of her head; gratitude that she had made it down there in one piece, and that she was alright. 

The time passed in companionable silence. Eventually, though, Buffy began to wonder whether she should have brought snacks, or insisted Giles bring bottles of water with him or something. At some point, if they stayed down here long enough, they would need supplies. /I suppose I could call for backup./ Though, stepping out far enough to get reception would be dangerous, since it might signal their current nemesis as to where its quarry lay. So might letting one of the gang know where they were so they could bring in supplies. And, /Man, I didn’t really plan this very well, did I?/ 

Time dragged on and on. The vague, diffuse light from what Buffy assumed was the opening of the cave, leading out to the forest beyond several bends in the sandstone passage, began to dim. Out there in the world, evening drew on, turned to night. The cavern darkened. One after another, she and Dawn had to venture off to the far back corner of the tunnel, around the bend, to do certain necessary things. 

They got thirstier. 

Dawn held out for a long while—a lot longer, honestly, than Buffy would previously have credited her—before finally complaining, apologetically, “I’m kinda getting really hungry, you guys.”

Buffy sighed and shot Spike a pained glance. “Yeah, I guess I should probably call someone from the gang and see if maybe they could bring us some…”

Before she could even finish, there came a slithering sound from the distant mouth of the cave, and the vague moonlight trickling in from Miller’s Wood was very abruptly cut off by the introduction of a large body. They heard a low, heavy, threatening hissing. 

/Well, shit. I guess that means showtime./

***

“Where the hell is it  _ going?” _

“I don’t fucking know, do I, Slayer? All I bloody well know is, we need to stop it before it gets back to her, innit!” Spike was driving like a bat out of hell, 

The snake-thing hadn’t attacked them at all. All it had done, once it found them, was to slither into the cave, rear up, stare at them for a sec with its big stupid forked tongue flickering around like it was testing the air around each one of them… then its eyes had gone crazy red and glowy before it just  _ turned right the hell around  _ and  _ left again,  _ just as fast as it had showed. Like, what? 

It had occurred to both Buffy and Spike in the same instant… of  _ course _ the damn thing wouldn’t have come there to kill Dawn. Glory wouldn’t want to destroy her Key! And this thing didn’t seem to be built to grab her or anything. It had arms, sure, but it wasn’t structured to fight two protectors and carry her off. 

But it for damn sure could head back to report to the boss.

Hence the driving.

Spike was breaking every damn speed-limit in Sunnydale—hell, in all of Southern California—keeping the thing in sight. Damn, it was fast. But at least he had ensured they had caught up to it. They’d almost lost it in their wild career through the woods, back to the car. It had barreled through the trees ahead of them at about twenty miles an hour. No way Dawn could run that fast. In the end, Spike had quite literally grabbed her up, flung her to his back, and carried her. He’d refused to pass her to Buffy even when he’d started to flag, muttering something about injuries, which was fair, since adrenaline or not, Buffy’s leg and shoulder were aching like woah. He’d also manfully ignored Dawn’s screeching teenage protests, her shocked demands as to why they were chasing down the huge, evil snake. Buffy had told her sister to shut up, and they’d continued pelting after the Sobekian whatever as fast as two supernatural beings carrying a third could make time, all the way back to the verge of the sparse woods.

Spike had probably used up most of the remaining rubber on the DeSoto’s tires peeling out of that parking lot; at least judging by the way it kept slewing around afterward like it had no tread left. Dawn was still bitching about the bump she’d gotten on her head when he’d literally  _ thrown _ her into the backseat. Oh, and the massive bump she’d apparently gotten on her shoulder when they’d had to swerve wildly to avoid a dumpster the snake-thing had slammed into the road with a sweep of its tail to slow them as it had exited the turnout. Spike’s hard swerve had kept them from ramming into the obstacle head-on, but not without a few casualties to extraneous limbs. 

They did a lot of wild zig-zagging through the city after that to keep the thing in sight, to the tune of some very upset complaints from their irate, alarmed backseat passenger. They had to get to it, though, before it got back to that bitch with its 411. There was no other option. Which meant following it around houses and through residential areas between Oak Park and Whiteoak Drive, all the way up to Maple Court, without getting hung up in any cul-de-sacs or dead ends. Thank god Spike knew his way around Sunnydale by now. 

In the end, her vampire gave in and drove straight through Heatherly Park like a madman, because he was over being polite and getting hung up in housing tracts. Dawn screeched in alarm as he slewed around leaving ruts in the grass, and swung sharply around picnic tables, and jolted through sandpits, and barely missed the hard, metal tubing of swing-sets; but the mad antics of it all did buy them just the few necessary feet to close the distance.

Buffy was out of the car and going full-tilt, sword in hand, as they regained asphalt. It hurt like hell on her bruised leg, but that didn’t matter right now. Nothing else mattered but catching the monster before it found Glory, wherever the hell she was hiding. 

Close enough, and she dove at the thing just as it exited Heatherly Lane to head toward one of those bike lanes near Ruggs Field. Describing a wild leap in the darkness, she landed on the snake-monster’s upright back, cowboy-style, seated her legs over its weirdly-constructed shoulders, caught up her sword-hilts in both hands. 

The snake reared back, thrashing. It had no idea that in doing so, it was only aiding her in securing its demise. As it pitched forward in an attempt to throw her off over its head, she used its momentum against it and drove her sword hard, clean through the back of its head. 

It shuddered, death already imminent as the blade pierced through tough scales to emerge from the other side of the skull. Buffy smelled the odd ichor-smell, heard the screaming hiss as it began to bubble from a mouth filling with fluid. The sword had exited, then, through the palate, or the throat, or some other part of the mouth.

She held on tight to the pommel of her blade, anchoring herself as the monster thrashed, and clung as it bucked and struggled in its death-throes. At some point, though, its fury weakened, and it gave in to the inevitable, sagging to the grass beneath. 

Buffy stepped off the wheezing monster, moved away to watch the gray film slowly close down over the vast, bulging eyes. She waited till it breathed its last and the tail ceased twitching before she yanked out her sword.

It was really tough to clean a sword off on grass. Why couldn’t this thing wear some kind of clothes?

Spike drew close, Dawn trailing in his wake. Reaching out one-handed, he prodded the thing with his axe. It didn’t twitch. “Quick work, Slayer. See how it is. Didn’t even leave anything for me to do.”

“Sorry.”

“Forgive you this time, pet.” 

Breathing hard, Buffy grounded her sword and leaned over it. Had her mouth ever been this dry? Man, it was like a desert! “Glad Giles gave us weapons, or I might’ve had to improvise.” Also, now that adrenaline was wearing off… damn, her leg hurt. And her shoulder wasn’t much better.

Spike narrowed his eyes at her. “Get the bloody fuck in the car, luv. You need cosseting.”

Buffy pushed herself up out of her hard lean with an effort. “What the hell kind of word is that?” she demanded.

Dawn rolled her eyes. “Whatever it means, I’m sure it’s x-rated. Please say this is over and you can drop me off at home before you start to ‘cosset’? Because I so don’t want to see it.”

Spike shot Dawn a faint glare. “Niblet,” he answered, and then shook his head and sighed. “Just get in the soddin’ car.”

“Amazingly enough,” Buffy put in as she climbed wearily into the vehicle after her sister, “we  _ do _ do other things.”

Dawn  _ humphed _ in disbelief. “Yeah, yeah. Can we stop on the way for, like, a Dr. Pepper or something? And, I dunno; maybe a Rancho Burger? Or, I dunno, a Party Box from Del Taco? Or, or, like, a…”

Sliding into his seat, Spike sighed and swung the DeSoto around to head back south. “What do you want to eat, love?” he asked Buffy, clearly consigning himself to the inevitable expenditure.

Buffy laid her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. “Food that is foody, and a drink. And then a massage, please, and I think I’ll go splat.”

One cool hand dropped from the steering wheel to lift one of hers, and a reverent, loving kiss was pressed to the back of her filthy, ichor-stained palm. “Your wish is my command, Slayer-mine.” 

The sword bobbled heavily against her thigh. Her head bounced, aching, against his shoulder as they jolted along through the occasionally-pitted streets of the town that was her charge, and eventually up some driveway to whatever fast-food place. Tomorrow they would have to face more Glory shenanigans, no doubt; or the Council, whichever came first. 

But she had Spike, and Spike had her; and for tonight, Dawn was safe. 

Nothing else mattered.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
So, that's one more person in the know, now, and probably amazing the secret lasted as long as it did, but Buffy has someone couple-y she can depend on for this stuff in this version, so of course Spike knew first instead of her endangering anyone else, him being her partner. Now Giles is in danger, as she'd see it. One wonders who'll find out next? And when Dawn will start to get suspicious, in this version?  
  
Thank you all, once more, for your continued patronage!  



	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... a whole hell of a lot happens in this one, and I'm really pleased with it.   
> Huzzah to wolf_shadoe for betaing my massive chapters and asking for more, cuz she's amazeballs.  
> Hope ya like!

Post-snake-adventure, Giles’ return to Sunnydale was accompanied by a significant amount of grilling on Mom’s part, though Buffy wasn’t privy to all of it. About the Council. About how they worked. About their attitudes toward the Slayer, and toward demons. About the Cruciamentum. About a whole lot of other things Buffy had never wanted to know about herself, really, much less wanted her mother to know.

She did a lot of excusing herself from the conversation, and spent a lot of time feeling nauseous as the streams of her life converged, sickeningly, twisting her existence up into one tight, inextricable ball. There was no safe space anymore, nowhere she could escape her Slayer-ness, forget it for a moment; just be a normal girl. 

Her sister wasn’t her sister anymore—or at least, not just her sister—but also a mystical Key she needed to protect from some blonde big bad with strength double (or maybe triple) that of a Slayer, and who could, of all terrifying things, quite literally wipe the floor with her. Her mother knew all about that Slayer life, down to the very nitty-gritty of things even Buffy had striven not to know. As of last year, her college, like her high school, had been invaded by things that went bump in the night, and could be again at any moment. Her town’s political underbelly was still rife, she didn’t doubt, with leftover demonic flunkies dating from the Mayor’s tenure. In fact, she counted on it when she helped demons to make accommodations with the human world; leaned on that reality in hopes that her efforts didn’t go for naught, and everything wouldn’t just reset itself back to human-normal the next morning. Her fiancé, for better or worse, was a demon—mostly better, for sure, except in that it didn’t afford her a non-supernatural place to hide from the job. Her friends? All into the paranormal stuff. Witches, all of them, or dating demons, or…

Even the most normal of the bunch, Xander, last bastion and champion of the human point of view, was going out of his way to be pro-demon-guy now, he was working so hard to stay on Anya’s good side. He was open and accommodating these days, encouraged her to tell her stories and share her 411, and…

And she had no way to beat this Glory bitch. They didn’t know where she was hiding, what direction she would strike from next. And when she did, Buffy had no idea what the hell she might do to stop the ho. 

On top of that, the stupid Council was on the damn way, to try to strip her of everything she had built in the last year. They were going to arrive at any time. At the worst possible time, of course; at which point, they were going to try to take Spike away from her. To insist she stand on her own, without backing, and face this threat with no one at her side; alone, as ever the Slayer was ‘meant to be’.

Stripped naked right now, Buffy was hitting overload.

Sore, broken in body, still struggling to heal in the aftermath of her humiliating showdown with that bitch, Buffy could only bury herself briefly in Spike’s soothing arms, till the anxiety drove her out of bed to pace like a tiger in a cage. Soon there would be an apocalypse, and it was going to be a doozy. It was coming. She could feel it in her bruised bones. It was affecting her thinking, affecting her physically. It made her fizz, anxious and uncertain and trammeled in place.

Her world was closing in. She needed some normalcy. She needed some little thing to remind her that she was a human girl too, with human needs and wants and… “Tell me about… about your life before.”

“Buffy…”

“Just… please, Spike. I need something different to think about. I need to hear about… About human-William.”

Spike sighed and tugged her up close, leaned his head back against the bedstead in the crypt. “Dunno what to tell you, pet. I was a limp virgin who spent all my time writing poetry about women even though I knew fuck-all about ‘em, because I spent my every waking moment dancing attendance on my mother. I know she wanted me to leave off, let her die in peace, get married so she could at least know I’d be taken care of before she died. She never said it, but…”

Something twinged, hard and painfully, in the link between them. And damn. There was a heavy bitterness in his voice that actually worried her as he said it. 

Also… he was a  _ virgin? _

Buffy honestly had a tough time imagining her guy ever being a virgin. Like,  _ ever _ . /Though, I mean, I guess everyone is at some point. But still./ “I’m sorry that you lost her.”

To her surprise, instead of seeking comfort, he froze. And then, even more surprising, he rose, slipping from her arms, to stalk away toward the far wall of the crypt. He stood there for a long moment, face to the wall with his bare back to her, every line of him broadcasting discomfort; even the beginnings of agony. When he finally spoke, his tones rang with a stifled anguish, and a guilt so vast that it made Buffy’s insides ache. 

Still, she didn’t expect what he said. “I tried to turn her, Buffy.”

/Wait, what?/ To say that she was shocked was an understatement.

“I didn’t want… After I was sired, I was so bloody full of life, yeah? It never occurred to me that she wouldn’t want it, too. It was a gift for me, an’ I never remotely thought it wouldn’t be the same for her. That she’d made her peace with death, that she wouldn’t want to be filled up with a soddin’ demon…” He spun on his heel, then, and there was a deep well of agony in his eyes; roiling between them, depthless. “So I sired her. Didn’t ask her if she consented, the way Dru did with me. I just… told her it was wonderful and then…” Everything in him shuttered, shut down, and for the first time, he looked… older. “And she  _ hated _ me. Told me I was the worst bloody disappointment she could imagine for a son. That I was a clinging milksop. That she’d always thought I’d never married because I had an Oedipal love for her, and wanted her like some soddin’ incestuous bastard. Christ, Buffy…” His eyes rose to hers, liquid and tormented. “She was a monster. And I had to stake her. I had to stake a demon wearing my mother’s face, and I…”

Buffy forgot, in that moment, that she had needed to hear a story that didn’t involve the supernatural, forgot everything. With an anguished cry, she flew from the bed. Ran to him, caught him in her arms. “Spike…” What could she even  _ say _ to that? “God, I’m so  _ sorry _ …”

“I killed her, Buffy,” he went on, inexorable; expression harsh, but there was a sob in his voice now. “I killed her twice, in the space of three days. Tore away her chance at heaven as well, and I…” He was fighting back the gasping, speaking through a throat clogged with unshed tears. She could feel them in him. Why wouldn’t he just let himself... 

/ _ God _ ./ “No. Spike,  _ no _ . I don’t think that’s how it works. And neither do  _ you _ . You  _ freed _ her, right? Spike?”

He was just shaking his head, over and over, unable to speak anymore. And she knew it was because for him, the state of being that was his current self and the William of before were indivisible. He had altered, been transformed, but he hadn’t died to his old self; not in the way she had once thought it. Which… what must that  _ mean _ for him, when it came to his mother? 

Catching his face, she pulled back to look into his eyes. “Her human soul was… what’s the word? Blameless, right? Like yours, before. They can’t carry the blame for the stuff the demon’s soul does. And when the demon comes in, a lot of them try to hurt the people the human soul loved, right? To break off all ties and stuff? I mean, maybe the demon was even doing it to make sure that she wouldn’t hurt you even more, or something. Or…” She struggled with it. Anything to wash away that godawful bleak, dead look in his gray-washed gaze. “…Maybe that particular demon just didn’t really like you, or whatever. But that was the  _ demon, _ Spike. Do you really think your  _ mom _ believed all that stuff this brand-new demon said? Because the demon didn’t even  _ know _ you!”

Spike looked startled. “It would’ve known me through her memories, would’ve just freed her up to say all the things she never…”

/No, nonono…/ “Yeah, okay, maybe it frees people up to say and do stuff they hold back before. But isn’t there also… Like, those memories are up to demon-interpretation, right? And don’t demons kind of have to learn to love?” He flinched hard, and she shook her head, immediately wishing she could take it back. Stupid Buffy word-badness. “Not what I meant, dammit. I mean, not in demon ways; but don’t demons just not get  _ human _ love?” More wincing, but she had him now, so she pressed on. “Some of it just seems kind of… dumb to demons, right? You and me… We still have… weird communication issues on that front, all the time.” /Boy howdy./ “I want stuff you don’t get at all—like the Great Valentine’s Day Fiasco, which, don’t even get me started on that—and you show love sometimes in ways that I’m not gonna even  _ comment _ on, or screw up completely spectacularly from my human point of view…” 

This time he sighed and rolled his eyes in his turn, because they both knew how long a list that was. “And I’m the first to admit that sometimes when I stop thinking and roll with my, you know, Slayer-y lizard brain, the stuff I want from you doesn’t even make sense to me, it’s so weird and primal and violent…” Which would have scared the shit out of her a year ago, but now it was just… a thing that happened. “So I could see how stuff that’s all tender and mom-son would just look cheesy and cheap to a brand-new baby demon. Or, I mean...” It was tough to even think about this when it came to something so touchy, but… “Also,  _ vampire _ . Maybe it just didn’t get the concept of parent-child relations that don’t involve sex, or whatever, so that was all it could think of?” /Because you vamps are nuts that way./ Who knew why she, the not-a-vamp in this situation, had to be the one to think of this stuff, but apparently he needed to be reminded of that, for some reason. 

She caught his upper arm, squeezed it tight. “But that doesn’t make what you had with your mom any less right, or good, or worthy as a mom-son thing, because some wet-behind-the-ears baby vamp didn’t get it, you know? I mean, I don’t know how things were between you and your mom, but judging by the way you are with  _ my _ mom, I can only assume it was a good relationship…”

He tightened up around the eyes, got that look of his that was Ultimate-Vulnerable-William-Spike. “It was,” he whispered.  _ “I _ thought it was…”

It was all she needed to know to proceed with certainty. “Well then. Don’t let this, like, one encounter with the newly-sired, pissed-off, vindictive baby-demon version of your mom ruin all the other memories you have of her, okay? Because if that’s what you’ve been carrying around for all these years, along with this whole, huge, walloping smack of guilt over having to dust her because of it, then…” Dammit. Okay. “Listen. I knew you were kind of a masochist, but this seriously takes the cake.”

He lifted his downcast eyes to hers, and to her relief, a faint smile twitched at the corner of his lips. “I love you, Buffy.”

/God, you’re a dope./ Pulling him sharply in against her, she dragged him in tight, dug her fingertips hard under the wings of his shoulder blades to keep him there. “I love you so much. And I wish you would’ve told me sooner…”

“It’s my greatest guilt. Carrying that…”

Buffy exhaled hard, trembled slightly, and… Probably he’d laugh or something. In comparison it wasn’t anything like on the same level, but maybe it would help him if they shared their guilty traumas, so… “I had a pet guinea pig once. A really gorgeous one. A Peruvian one with this beautiful, long, golden hair. I combed it and put bows in it and… And then I got into cheerleading, and the cage was off to one side, down in the garage, and I was supposed to feed it; and I just woke up one day, and realized I hadn’t fed it in… I forget how long. So I raced down there and looked in the little house, and it was…” She was shaking again, remembering. “S…so I poured a bunch of pellets in the bowl so Mom and Dad would never know what I… What I did, and tried not to look at… what it looked like, and made up a story about how I just didn’t know what happened, and maybe it just got sick, and…” The guilt of having starved a caged animal through sheer, thoughtless neglect still horrified her, to this day.

Spike’s voice was oddly thoughtful when he answered, though his hand automatically stroked over her spine. “How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

A short silence, then, “You were likely just starting to feel the power of bein’ a Potential along about then as well. It would’ve been awfully distracting.”

She trembled, nauseous with it. Her stomach always lurched with the recollection. “Don’t tell me it’s okay. It would be like locking someone in a room and forgetting to feed them and…” She shuddered. “I was responsible, and I…”

A kiss to the top of her head, whether to show understanding, or to absolve, she wasn’t sure. “I’ve never told anyone about that,” she confessed, a little shakily, and maybe she did feel a little better. “I’m never gonna have a pet again, though. No dogs or cats for Buffy. I don’t have the time for them, obviously. And whenever people talk about having kids, in the back of my mind all I can think is, I killed a guinea pig! And I wasn’t even a Slayer then! How could I…”

He pulled back sharply to stare at her, fighting to meet her, his piercing with a sudden understanding she could  _ feel _ . “Oh, bloody fuck, love.”

She shrugged it off, braved lifting her gaze to his. “Just so you know, not ever in Buffy’s life plan.”

His hand rose, cupped her cheek. “Buffy…” 

“I mean, especially considering how freaked out I’ve been over this whole Dawn thing. If it’s this hard worrying about protecting a teenage sister from the big bads of the world, could you imagine trying to keep a _baby_ safe? And I look at Mom, and how much I scare her, just going out every night… And look how  _ Dad _ responded…”

Spike’s hand dropped, really suddenly, and he went the consistency of a glacier. “Yeah. About that. If I’m ever gonna meet the bloke, I should probably know what it is makes you go all wonky just thinking about him an’ vamps in the same soddin’ sentence, pet.”

“Oh.” /Shit, why did I bring it up?/ 

Pulling away, Buffy turned to head back for the bed. “That… is not a pretty story,” she managed, almost lightly. “And I know you’re already not a fan, so probably…”

“Well, the git deserted my three favorite girls to run off with his secretary. Considerin’ that… If there’s one thing I can’t bloody well stand, it’s an inconstant bastard who can’t keep his prick in his trousers or his word in mind when it comes to takin’ care of his women. And look at Joyce; just  _ look _ at her. Any man who couldn’t stay faithful to a beautiful bird like her has to be utterly daft.” Judgment, just rolling off of him. He really wouldn’t ever understand, unless she explained it, would he? “Sounds like the sort of bloke who needs a nice, stern talkin’ to; even before the bit where he broke my girls’ hearts over and bloody over again, makin’ promises and then not showin’ up…”

/You don’t get it. And also…/ “You’re not convincing me to tell you anything else that will lower your opinion any more than it already is. I mean, I have my issues with my father, but I don’t want you to drain him, either.” /Especially since… it’s not his fault. It’s mine./ Of course, to tell Spike about all that would be to admit… culpability. It would keep her guy from murdering her father… but it would also be voicing… everything.

It would make it all real.

“Oh, Christ.” Moving over to the foot of the bed, Spike took a careful seat and watched her warily across about three feet of space, hands dropped in his lap. “Tell me, Buffy. What happened with your sod of a father and vampires?”

Buffy bit her lip. He was so not going to like it. “Um, okay. I need you to promise me something first, before I tell you.”

His eyes flared on hers, briefly. He knew what it meant for her to ask. “I’m not to rush out and kill him the minute I hear, is it?”

/A little more than that./ “I don’t know if I should tell you even if you promise that much. It, um, might ruin your relationship with Mom a little, too, which… I don’t know if that’s fair to either of you, since this was totally so long ago, and way over, and…” /Not her fault either. All mine./

At this point he’d completely stopped breathing and gone absolutely still. “Buffy…”

“Alright.” /Dammit./ She hated feeling trapped. But he so wasn’t going to let it go at this point. “But… you’re not gonna like it.”

“I figured.” A rapid, indrawn breath. “I promise… I’ll do my best to try to understand… where everyone was when it happened. And to remember where everyone is now. Will that do?” His jaw was tense as he said it, the tiny muscle ticcing away in the corner. 

Pulling in a deep, fortifying breath of her own, Buffy nodded and looked down into her hands. Fought down the flare of old, sick guilt, struggled through the morass of it so she could force the heavy words to the surface. “Okay, so you have to remember that for Mom and Dad, I’d just burnt down my school gym. I was their previously-sane daughter, who was suddenly coming to them talking about destiny and seeing monsters. They, um, thought I’d had a psychotic break. And the cops were talking to them about trials, and jail, and me ending up with a juvenile record, and… all that stuff. And I was acting pretty unhinged. I mean, I just saw my first Watcher die, and I just… I wasn’t handling things very well, you know?”

She felt his reaction. She didn’t need to look at him to know that he had frozen completely. That he was suffused with rage. She could feel him; the way the horror blasted through him, the way her own, long-buried suffering and pain rocked him. “They didn’t,” he whispered, and his tone of voice was sickened.

/Yeah, Spike. That’s what happened./ “I learned quick to say what they wanted me to say, while I was in there. And to… you know. Stop talking about it. So, um… they let me out quick. I was only in there for…” She faltered, her tautly-held front crumpling in spite of all her best efforts. “Uh, a couple of weeks…”

“Bloody fuck, Buffy.”

She had started to shake, in spite of herself. She had tried to stay above the memories. To float just at the surface. But he could feel it with her, which made it difficult not to plunge back in, and… 

She couldn’t seem to lift her eyes to meet his horrified gaze, as it all came flooding out. The whole confused, agonized mess of it; shame and pain and betrayal. Old wounds and new. The way the memories grabbed hold, like clawed things, to drag her, involuntarily, back down below the surface, into the bewildering mire. “Dawn had no idea, of course.” /Just skim. Summarize. Breathe./ “They lied to her and said I was on vacation somewhere. Visiting relatives, I think, or at cheerleading camp, or something. And, you know…” /Keep it light. Just the facts./ “…Then our parents got divorced over it, and I’ll always know that I’m the reason. The reason Dawn lost her family too. That they would’ve been fine, if it weren’t for me…” Knowing that Dawn hadn't really even been there didn't make that part of the trauma any less real in retrospect. Not to the emotional certitude of what she had done to her family, just by being what she was.

“Oh, bloody hell. Buffy…” Spike's hands on hers now, trying to help, to breathe calm into her, but...

/No. I can’t./ She lifted her voice, strove to just… get it all out. He had to know, and she had to just blurt everything, before it dragged her under again. She managed to go every day without thinking of it. It was so much easier. /Just stick to the parts he needs to know./ “It wasn’t… Dad’s fault at all.” He had to know that it was all her fault, for being the Slayer. The divorce. Everything. That this was, ultimately,  _ why _ she would never want to have children. Why… Why the relationship was okay, as long as she was with him; a guy who, magically, would never get her pregnant, would never leave her. But he also had to know the rest. “I mean, Mom said I was acting out because they had problems, but Dad said I was grown up enough not to act like that no matter what they were going through. So he left. 

“And then…” All the old horror washed over her. The trap of it. The inescapable reality of her destiny, her Calling. “…We moved to Sunnydale. I thought it was over.” She caught her breath, fought to keep  _ on _ breathing as it pounded in her; that shocking moment when the 'Vampyre' book hit the library counter, and another English guy in tweed told her, yet again, that there was no escaping the thing that had destroyed her family. The destiny that had nearly destroyed her life. “And then there was Giles,” she whispered. “Right in my face; and it all started all over again. I couldn’t escape it.” 

Her gaze rose to his finally, saw him staring helplessly at her, azure-eyed and agonized on her behalf. “Without Wil and Xander and him, I don’t think I’d’ve stayed sane; because there were only so many vamps to dust to keep me from thinking, but there were always too many, and I couldn’t make it  _ stop _ . And at the same time, if it would just stop… It  _ had _ to stop, right? Because I needed to be  _ normal _ . Because the drugs and being helpless and being locked up and tied down…” She looked away. “They drugged me more, you know, because when you freak out, and you’re Slayer-strong, and you can tear through those stupid Velcro things, they just give you more drugs; the kind that mess with your head, till you almost believe them. Was I crazy? Did I make it up?”

“Christ, pet…”

She could feel his horror for her, but it was a distant thing at this point. Everything was distant. “Mostly,” and now it came out bitterly, “I think, it was because they just didn’t want to deal with hearing people screaming at them to please, please, let me go home, I’m not crazy…” She knew she was crying now, dammit, that he hated seeing those silent tears rolling down her cheeks. She hated it too; the ache in the back of her throat, the tightness, her nose starting to get stuffy, but… “So, you get it, right? That’s why I knew I couldn’t ever tell Mom again. I was in a band with you, or I was failing at school, or I was in a girl-gang with Faith… but I had to be some kind of normal, even if it was the world’s worst student and a horrible delinquent or even a drug addict; whatever, but not… Because if I ever did tell her again what I  _ really _ was, she might send me back, and… And the first time around, she never really agreed, you know? That was mostly Dad. He was  _ scared _ of me…”

“Oh, Buffy…”

“That was why he wanted out,” she whispered, and felt the tears, falling on her wrists. No scars there, from those horribly soft restraints they had employed. “He just wanted the cops to go away, and the problem to go away… But I came back, eventually. So when I came back, he left; and he’s never been the same since. He doesn’t want to see me…” She swallowed, somehow. “But what if Mom… What if she ever agreed with him? Which is why I ran to LA, and…”

He was there then, holding her, smoothing the tears out of her, and she felt so  _ stupid _ , crying into his chest, because this was all so long ago, and it didn’t matter anymore, right? Mom  _ knew _ now, she  _ believed _ , and she had never tried to send her back to the psych ward, because this time she’d had Giles on her side, and her friends to back her up, and… 

Except… “And when  _ Giles _ gave me those drugs, it was just like… Because I thought I could  _ trust _ him, you know? He was on  _ my _ side! He was…”

Spike turned to stone all around her. “Yeah,” he husked, harsh and grating in her ear. “Tell me about that.”

/Oh God./ He’d told her before, when it had first come up, that he was aware of what the Cruciamentum was...ish. In an ‘around the edges’ kind of way, from the outside looking in. He had, after all, studied Slayers. He hadn’t known what it was called, but he’d known that the Council had ‘tested’ a number of past Slayers who were experts at their trade, in the process ‘accidentally’ killing off a number of them before he, at his height of Slayer-hunting prowess, had been able to close with these ones whose reputations had begun to spread far and wide. He’d mentioned in passing that it had always felt, in the past, a little like someone had stolen his kill; had irritated him to hear that yet another eighteen-year-old, famous ‘chit’ had met her demise in some mini-Slayer-Olympics with a handpicked vamp before he could try his hand.

He had, though, previously assumed that it had been all a Council thing when it had happened to her, and had been mostly focused on pride in her accomplishment that she had ‘won’ her contest.

Buffy had never wanted to correct his view, had really gone into gory detail with him before now. Mostly because she hadn’t wanted to rock the boat. He got along with Giles. Why even go there? 

Now, though, the incredibly furious, vengeful cat was out of the bag. “Don’t hurt him. He took it back. He tried not to let it happen. The Council… But then they sent some other guys to finish it. I got another Watcher. A new guy. And I was locked in this house with this vamp named…”

“Kralik.” He breathed it, vibrating now.   
  
“Yeah.” Right. She had mentioned that before. She’d forgotten, till now. “And I guess he had mommy-issues, so he grabbed Mom, too, and…”

The need for violence pervaded his frame to swirl between them, held only very thinly in check.  _ “Zachary _ Kralik?” he inquired, low and careful. The words came out bitten off, tight and sharp-sounding at the ends.

Startled out of her shaky recital, Buffy almost stuttered the answer. “I… I think so?” To her embarrassment, the words came out caught on a sob, her lungs fluttering for oxygen. “Why?”

“Nothing. And the Wanker’s Council brought him to... test you? While you were drugged?”

Oh god, he was beyond furious. But in that cold way, that said the only reason he wasn’t already rushing off to rip off heads and drink from brain stems was because she was sitting on his lap. She had to keep him here by dint of using him for physical comfort. He always automatically cleaved to that role before all others, with her. “Yeah,” she answered softly, and toyed with his bracelet again. “I… I guess now you know why I have an issue with birthdays, between that one and the one before it.” She released the bracelet and leaned back against him, held her breath for a sec before releasing it. “It’s called the  _ Tento Di Cruciamentum _ . It’s supposed to prove that the Slayer’s good enough to do the job even without her powers, just using her wits or whatever…”

His answer, ground out between his teeth, interrupted her with grim, fierce certainty. “Bollocks. It’s meant to knock off a Slayer has lived long enough to start to question their tactics. And that Rupert went along with it, even to start, is enough he should die a slow and painful death…”

/Shit./ “Spike…”

“I won’t do it. Not if you don’t want me to.” His voice was low with promise. “But Buffy, when those Council sods come, I’m gonna have a very fucking hard time not flensing every single sodding one of ‘em. Slowly. With my teeth.”

“Oh, God,” she whispered into his sternum, because right now she wasn’t sure what she could say to stop him. 

Right now, she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to. Her compass with regard to right and wrong was a little shaken at the moment by her own resurgent personal trauma. 

“Especially knowing they left you in the sodding asylum…”

Buffy closed her eyes against his throat as he asked her to face a question she had never wanted to before today. “I kinda wonder sometimes if they always thought I was damaged goods," she whispered. "Merrick said they missed me somehow; you know, before? And when I met Kendra, and saw how they raised her—they caught her young, like you said they catch most of ‘em. Like the one you fought in China?—she was completely, I dunno, brainwashed, but somehow they missed me. Though, I dunno. They missed Faith, too. And… I mean, sometimes Giles acts like he thinks he’s totally at a loss with me…”

“Rupert,” Spike growled, interrupting her, “feels at a bloody loss because he never expected to be granted a soddin’ Slayer. Because he’s a bleedin’ black sheep as well. You think someone with his soddin’ background gets first pick?”

Buffy pulled back a little, surprised at this alternate point of view. “Oh.” Then… “So, why give me to him, if they thought I needed straightening out, or…”

“Why leave you in the bleedin’ nuthatch, love?” he answered, sounding more bitter than Buffy had ever heard her. “They were done with you. On a hellmouth, with a Watcher they thought unprepared, you weren’t likely to last, was it? Then you did, because you’re better than all those gits put together… so they tried to assassinate you.”

Buffy stared at him, stunned. “But…” It hit her then. “But I didn’t. I died, right off the bat, in only a couple of months. Xander resuscitated me…”

Spike snorted at that. “Yeah. No doubt a few of that lot have it in for Harris as well.”

“Oh, man…” The thought that the Council, supposedly on her side, actually wanted her to bite it, should have been shocking. Instead it just… finally made sense. 

“And then you went on outlasting everything. You couldn’t bloody well be killed, could you? Probably from their perspective it made no sodding sense for there to be two Slayers animated with the essence of the Line or whatever the bloody hell it is, and you ought to have keeled right the hell over the second the other chit was Called, but instead here you are, powerful as ever. Possibly moreso…”

Buffy blinked at that. The idea that she might have just kicked off when Kendra took up the charge was one that had never occurred to her, but she supposed it made sense, since technically the Slayer-essence was a single entity. “Huh.”

“No doubt they sent this second Watcher bloke to keep an eye on you and figure out why the hell you were even still kicking, as much as to take on your girl Faith, innit? With you goin’ off half-cocked, gettin’ a yen for vamps an’ the like…” He wasn’t teasing, and she could see the whole thing, as he posited it, from the Watchers’ perspective, and oh, god…

/They’ve probably wanted me dead for years./ 

The Cruciamentum made so much more sense now, as did the wetworks guys’ willingness to knock off either or both of them in their quest to stop whichever Slayer was the ‘rogue’ at the time of their last visit. /It doesn’t really cost them anything to kill me, does it? The Line doesn’t go through me anymore…/

/Oh. But it doesn’t help them, either. They’d still be stuck with Faith. Killing me doesn’t net ‘em a new Slayer./

/Man. Oh, wow. They probably only stopped coming after me because they don’t know whether Faith’s gonna play ball./ 

Buffy shook her head and resumed burying her face in his chest, because suddenly the Council’s upcoming visit seemed more and more like a straightforward assassination. At best, they’d probably wait till she dealt with Glory, then… 

She imagined a dramatically-mimed throat-cutting gesture. “Can you just hold me, Spike, and we can worry about the Council tomorrow? I can’t think right now to plan. I just need to…” She closed her eyes again. “I just need you.”

“I’m here, Buffy.” But he was still stiff, taut and tense, and…

Eventually she sighed. “Okay, what? I mean, I know you want to run off and slaughter all of ‘em, but I…”

“It’s not that. Yeah, sure, I’d bloody well love to go on a soddin’ spree right now, but…” He fell silent, stroking her hair. And for all the gentleness in his touch, she could feel a shaking core of anger in him that wouldn’t be satisfied. Except… this felt more… personal somehow. 

“What is it?” she asked, because if he didn’t speak up, it would drive her nuts.

“Alright. I guess… I need to ask you something. But you might not be in the right place to answer the question at ‘mo.”

Buffy turned in his arms, leaned back against his chest, head seated just under his collarbone. His arms fell lightly around her, so that her hands could curl around and settle over his; so she could play a little with his silver bracelet. “Okay?”

He hesitated. She could feel the hesitation. Then… “You let me bind you.”

/Oh. Right. Shit. / That  _ would _ come up. “I asked you to,” she reminded him, quietly certain.

“But… it brought up the past, for you.” It wasn’t a question.

She wouldn’t lie about it. /Alright, dammit./ “I was testing myself,” she told him soft and sure. “I didn’t even think about it, till it happened. Till it came up, I didn’t even…”

A hint of anger was in his voice now. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you use your word, Buffy? Ask me to stop? You know I could tell there was something…”

She bit her lip, and gave up fiddling with his jewelry. “Because I didn’t want you to stop.”

He vibrated then, containing what was probably fury at her. And she knew what he was thinking; that she had used him, or just powered through and ignored something traumatic, or… “It’s not what you think.”

“Tell me,” he began, his words tight and clipped, “what you think I think. And then tell me what it was instead.”

/Oh man./ “You think I just pushed through something bad so you could enjoy yourself. That’s not what it was. Once I realized what was happening, I… analyzed myself and realized… I wanted to get past it. That I felt safe with you. Which… I never thought I would like it. And because of that… I wanted to work through it. Because… right then, I actually felt powerful.” Picking up one of his hands, she pressed it between both of her own, silently begging him for understanding. “Spike, I know you’ve done… That you’ve been through… stuff like this. So I know you’ll get how… I  _ definitely _ never thought I’d feel  _ that _ . But I did; because you were just completely losing it even just  _ looking _ at me like that, which was nuts. And it made me feel like I was the one who had all the power over you…”

He stilled under her touch. “You did,” he answered, reluctant, but admitting defeat.

She nodded, drew his hand up to her lips. Kissed it gently, then pulled it to the hollow between her breasts, held it to her heart. Covered it with both of hers. “So I thought about it… and I decided to just keep going, as long as it was a good thing. And it kept being a good thing. So there was never a reason to stop. And I don’t think there will be, with us." Opening to him, she made sure he could feel her certitude. "But I promise; if there ever is, I will definitely let you know.”

The fury had long subsided, given way to bewilderment. His head lowered till his forehead pressed to the back of her skull. “But you could’ve told me, Buffy! You could’ve let me share that journey with you!”

/Yeah, okay, but…/ “I didn’t want to ruin it. I was enjoying myself, and you were enjoying everything; so much. If I took a time-out to explain the whole thing the way I did just now, it would have completely trashed the mood. Turned it into, like, this therapy session; and that was so not what I wanted it to be. I was barely sober, and I wanted—no.  _ Needed _ —fun, happy, no responsibility sex. So, yeah. I put the hold-button on explanations and rolled with it.” She turned her head slightly to regard what she could of his face; the steep curve of his cheekbone, the sharp, set edge of his jaw and chin. “Is that a crime? Just to stay in the moment, as long as it was working? I mean, it’s not like I planned it; not like I knew it was gonna come up and decided to, I dunno, deceive you, or…”   
  
He closed his eyes, lowered his forehead to her temple. “No, it’s not a crime, Buffy. It happens. I’m glad… Glad that it was a good experience. It’s only… I never want to be a part of anything that hurts you. The idea that anything between us might ever be traumatic for you scares the bloody hell out of me.”

Buffy scoffed. “We played with handcuffs already; like, what? A month and a half into this? We took freaking  _ turns _ .” 

He sighed heavily. “My adventurous, kinky kitten…”

Buffy shrugged. “We’ve both been through things. And we’re both, you know, filled up with crazy power, and wacko urges, and sometimes I want to dominate you and drive you nuts, and sometimes you want to do it to me, and as long as we’re both cool with it, what’s the problem, right?”

He didn’t answer, but he did tremble a little beneath her.

“And stuff might come up, right, that we don’t predict. I mean, you’ve lived a zillion years…”

“Oi!”

“And we’re both grownups. We have to trust each other to deal with our crap, and decide when to wave the white flag and when to just roll with it…”

“Do I get to go down to this hospital in LA and eat any of the sods who hurt you?”

“No. They were just doing their jobs.”

“Christ, pet. Do I ever get to eat  _ anybody _ who’s hurt you?”

Buffy exhaled heavily into the cool, moist air of the crypt. “Can I, I dunno, take a rain-check on that till there’s a serious thing going down? I mean, I’d need to do a total threat-assessment first, at least…”

“Bloody hell. You’re so sodding  _ businesslike _ , Slayer…”

“You’re my secret weapon. Pull vampire out of back-pocket. Use in last-ditch defense…”

“Hell. That just sounds like a whole sodding lot of not eating people.”

“Well…”

She found herself very abruptly rolled over, and a glaring vampire was atop her, pinning her down bodily. “You’re bloody lucky you’re fucking amazing in bed, Slayer.”

Buffy shivered in pleasure at the compliment, aware she was blushing. She was still, almost a year later, thoroughly stunned to hear him tell her that. “I…”

“Hush,” he told her, and dove for her mouth.

When he kissed her, though, he was strangely gentle. And when he loved her, it was like he was afraid she would break if he didn’t handle with care.

At least, until she took him in hand. Figuratively speaking. 

Or something.

***

“Spike, I really think we ought to step aside for a moment.”

They were all waiting at the Magic Box for their newest arrival; all a little bit tense, a few of them hovering in gaggles. Some of them were even jittering. Still, this latest was a surprise. “Why… What…”

Giles shot Buffy a glance, then narrowed his eyes at her vampire. “It’s nothing that concerns you, per se, Buffy. Just a bit of air needs clearing between the two of us, privately.”

Spike had drawn himself up, oddly, and to Buffy’s surprise, he nodded acceptance of this weirdly oblique statement. “Yeah. Sure, Rupert. I need a fag anyway.” And without any further ado he pivoted on his booted heel to head toward the back door.

Buffy stared after them, nonplussed. “Wh…” This was so bizarre. The last time Giles had tried to pull Spike aside without her, Spike had adamantly refused to discuss anything without her present.  _ “Anything you want to say to me, Watcher, you can say in front of the Slayer.”  _ To which, Buffy had of course replied with,  _ “Ditto.” _

So then why… /We have a united front. We’re supposed to  _ always _ have a united front!/

Okay, what even? 

Curious as hell, Buffy made to trail after them, only to have Giles half-turn back and narrow his eyes at her. “Actually, Buffy, maybe it might be best if you met Faith at the depot, don’t you think? Get things off on the right foot between you, this time round?” And, with a small nod, as if he just assumed she would prance off and follow his orders—which, what? She hadn’t even done that when she was sixteen!—he turned back to head out through the dojo door in Spike’s wake.

Okay, now she was starting to get pissed off. Just, what the freaking… 

Had both Giles and her guy just, like…  _ dismissed _ her?

She had her hand on the knob when Xander halted her with a little sharp clearing of the throat. “Buffy… don’t.”

She whirled on him, furious. “What is this, some kind of guy-conspiracy?”

Her male bestie shook his head, though he had a little smile on his face that was doing nothing for her temper. “No. Not… exactly. They’re just going to go have the talk. You know,  _ the talk?” _

What the hell was he muttering about? “Xander, seriously. If you’re gonna speak, speak in English, okay, because…”

“It’s pretty straightforward,” Jonathan put in, calm and soothing. “Mr. Giles considers himself your father,  _ in loco parentis _ , and Spike’s just asked for your hand. Therefore, it’s incumbent upon Mr. Giles to take Spike out back and tell him that if he ever hurts you, he’ll drag him out into the sun, stake him out over a barbecue pit, and watch him slowly flake away into a thousand tiny, ashy pieces of former vampire.”

Buffy blinked at the two male Scoobies, absolutely floored at this utterly ludicrous explanation.  _ “Excuse _ me?”

“It’s a time-honored tradition,” Andrew put in sagely, because who gave  _ him _ permission to speak up about her life? “Passed down from generation to generation, man to man, from the first  _ Australopithecus Afarensis _ to today’s modern human…”

“Andrew, shut up.” Buffy was utterly boggled. “Are you saying Giles is actually out there  _ threatening _ Spike right now, as if he could even remotely…”

“I dunno,” Willow interrupted her, “he was pretty scary in his Ripper days, wasn’t he?” She had a little frown on her lips, and hold up. Was she on  _ their _ side?

“Wil, I don’t  _ believe _ you. Do you think this… this  _ Neanderthal _ display of…”

Willow held up one hand to forestall the rest of her outburst. “Okay, no. Not officially. Officially, as a feminist, I’m appalled. But unofficially, I think it’s kind of…”

“Sweet,” Tara finished for her, and she had a little smile on her lips. “It’s so… dad-like. It’s kinda cute. Don’t you think?”

Buffy tried on a growl of her own as she tore the door open. “I’m gonna kill them both.”

She could hear them, of course, before she even made it to the outside door. “Obviously, in lieu of her father, I feel it’s rather my role under current circumstances. You understand, old man.”

“Normally I’d feel right weird if you didn’t speak up,” Spike could be heard to answer in a deceptively calm voice Buffy knew to be one of his most dangerous. “But that was before I heard the name Zachary Kralik.”

There was a long, very profound silence between them. Buffy closed her eyes and started to shake. 

When Giles spoke up, all affable humor had fled from his voice in exchange for a pained realization that he might just die. “I… very much regret… that I was a part of that travesty. I tried to see to it that it did not occur. Unfortunately, other members of the Council…”

“The sonofabitch took Joyce, as well? You drugged a chit you call daughter? Do you have any fucking clue how terrifying that was for her?” 

Silence.

“You know the only reason I don’t drain you where you stand is she loves you. She’s forgiven you. Christ knows why.”

When Giles spoke up, his voice sounded shaken. “I… I tried to call it off. She knows… that I regret…”

Spike’s tones were bleak as he interrupted, making Buffy’s hand tighten, forgotten on the doorknob. “You needn’t worry, Watcher. I ever hurt her, I’d dust m’self ‘fore you could ever lift a stake.”

Giles sounded smaller. Shrunken. “I… know. I’d only felt it needed to be said. It’s… ceremonial.”

“Yeah.” Spike’s answer was clipped. Harsh. But the feel of him…

He was this close to throwing Giles up against a wall or something. He was shaking with restrained fury. /God./

He also knew she was near. Which was probably why he hadn’t done it.

“Right, then,” Spike spoke up after a long moment. “We’ve established, I ever hurt her, I’ll dust. You ever betray her again, though, and I’ll bloody well drain you; and don’t think for a second I’ll hold off to salve her feelings. Not again.”

“Right,” Giles answered. Short. Clipped.

Things remained quiet. Buffy closed her eyes, laid her forehead against the panel of the door, and wished she hadn’t followed them. /I didn’t need to hear this. I could have lived happy without knowing…/ Because now she would have to say something about it, to Spike. She couldn't just let him...

“Here, then. Let that seal it.”

Lifting her head, Buffy blinked at the closed door. /Huh?/

“On any normal day, I’d decline, but considering… Cheers.” Giles had a very odd tone in his voice as he accepted… whatever; almost an ironic one. And his voice was all muffled at the end.

And then Spike was speaking again, this time weirdly companionable. “No one’d know you haven’t smoked in ages, to watch you, Rupert.”

/Wait. Giles is  _ smoking? _ / 

“Yes, well… Expected to have to act the part. Appreciate the fag.” 

“No charge.”

They were silent for long enough that Buffy almost reached for the doorknob again, then, “You’ll give her away, innit?”

A little cough, though it changed mid-stream to a careful throat-clearing. “If that prat Hank doesn’t show.”

“Might be best he doesn’t. I’d have a difficult bloody time not biting the sodding git.” 

“Hold fast, old man. She still loves the tosser, for some reason or other.”

“Yeah.” Buffy could feel the—expected this time—surge of violent rage, carefully suppressed, in her vampire, heard him speaking tightly around his cigarette. “You know what that fucking bastard did to her, before she came here, do you? Or, I suppose you mightn’t, or you wouldn’t’ve done what you did in turn.”

When Giles answered, it was in equally tight tones. “Please, do enlighten me.”

/He’s… he’s settling on Giles because he still thinks my dad is worse. Oh, God./ 

Buffy turned away, feeling a little nauseous as she headed back into the main space. Maybe she would go pick up Faith after all. 

Navigating the streets with care around the damn driving slit, she made it to the Greyhound depot without incident, and put the DeSoto in park. A quick check of the leaderboard in the filthy, dingy office informed her that the bus from LA was on time. Her sister-Slayer would arrive in about fifteen minutes. 

Her hands were  _ not _ shaking. 

The bus pulled in as expected to idle in the wide parking lot. People piled out to loiter to one side, waiting for their luggage. Predictably, Faith exited carrying only a drawstring knapsack that probably held all of two changes of clothing and some makeup, and maybe an extra stake, because the girl knew how to travel light. 

Buffy sucked in a hard breath to steady herself. /Okay. I can do this. We can… start over./ 

/God,  _ can _ we start over?/

Her emotions were a serious whirl. Faith had tried to steal her life. 

She had stabbed Faith in the stomach and put her in a coma.

Faith had shot her former boyfriend with a poisoned bolt, and lied to everyone; tried to pin a murder on her.

She had been the ringleader of a group that had thoughtlessly treated the other girl like a worthless piece of crap. Faith was the one true Slayer, really; at least, as far as the Line was concerned. They had left her to molder alone in a motel, with all the emotional support of a homeless runaway, like she was worth nothing. 

/God. If we had just…/

Maybe everything would have been different, way back then, if they had just treated Faith like she belonged, from the start. Faith hadn’t acted like she’d wanted to be accepted, to be a part of… but that had probably all been just a big huge front. She had obviously needed it, whatever she’d said. Just the way she’d acted when Mom had invited her over for dinner had proved that much. 

/Can I do that now? Can I wipe the slate clean? Can I…/

“Hey, girl.” The words were out of her mouth before she realized she meant to say anything. And somehow she found herself standing with one foot inside the car and one out, leaning on the open door of the DeSoto, head out and one arm up to signal her sister-from-another-mother… 

And now Faith was turning to zero in on her, shock predominant on her face, because she so had not expected a ride, had been making a beeline for the Sunnydale Transit bus stop…

Face illegible, she altered her trajectory to make for the car, and all the sudden Buffy had zero time to analyze her instinctive move, or to catch her breath, or to wonder just what the hell she thought she was doing as that feeling of… reverse polarity struck her, as it always had, whenever Faith came near. That feeling she had felt with Kendra, as well. That feeling she always had to fight to overcome, a sensation that was one part pull toward something partofme and two parts push against something that should never exist in the same place at the same time, because therecanbeonlyone.

And above all, as ever, there was that deep, aching yearning; the one she had almost forgotten, that always seemed to want to drag them together. A need to feel whole. To heal something that had been fissioned; was torn, or broken, and wanted to come close. To cling. To be reabsorbed, or… “Hey, B. Long time no see.” Faith’s eyes rose, not-quite-emotionless, not-quite-burning; slid down, assessing their ride. “This hot, blond, and wiry’s car?”

Thrown, Buffy choked a little on the description. “Yeah.” /Shit, how do I even  _ talk _ to her?/

Faith’s lips quirked up slightly. “Hell, B; since when do you drive?”

Buffy opened her mouth to answer, but Faith had already wrenched open the passenger side door to toss her miniscule bag into the back seat and was clambering in the roomy oven of the cab. 

With a shrug, Buffy followed suit. Faith was never much for small talk, anyway.

As she settled behind the wheel, the brunette Slayer assessed the miniscule driving slit, the tiny arcs scraped into the wind-wings for viewership of the mirrors… and eyed her with what looked like amusement. “You’re not gonna kill us both, are you? Want me to drive?”

/Okay, dammit./ “A, no, because Spike would actually kill me if I let anyone else touch his baby, and B, if you’re gonna act like this the whole way, I’ll get a complex and probably drive us into a wall or something. Stop making me self-conscious.” 

One dark, perfect eyebrow lifted in surprise. “Didn’t know I could make you self-conscious.” Leaning back, Faith closed her eyes and stretched out her arms across the top of the low-slung seats. “Hell; it’s just good to chill in a place that’s not packed with people. Buses stink, you know?”

She definitely remembered. “Yeah.” She started the car, studiously checked her mirrors (luckily since there wasn’t a vamp in the car right now, Buffy could drive with the windows down for greater visual access), and began to back out. 

“Your guy teach you to drive?”

Buffy fought not to snap back that she’d already known how to drive. More or less. “Yeah, he… Yeah.”

“Must be love if he lets you drive his ride. If I know guys and classic cars, it’s a whole love affair thing. I knew this dude back in Boston who would let me do anything to his body—hell, I could start that fucker on fire if I wanted to—but I couldn’t even get in his car without taking my shoes off. I dropped his ass so fast… The sex was okay, but there’s only so much bullshit I can put up with.”

A year ago, Buffy would have been horrified by a story like that, and Faith obviously knew it. This was, she thought, some kind of test. So, with a faint smile, she simply guided the DeSoto through the series of lights down Maple Court. Luckily, the Magic Box was literally a straight shot south from the bus depot. “Yeah, well… There’s kinky, and there’s prized possessions. Let’s just say we have chains in the crypt, but I don’t even get to touch Spike’s vinyl collection.”

Faith leaned back a little at that to regard her, Buffy thought, with the beginnings of a new respect. Buffy was aware even though she was blushing, and even though she carefully avoided looking at the other Slayer, that she had earned several very serious points back right then and there. “Damn, B. I never pegged you for a bondage girl…”

Buffy pressed her lips together to avoid a smirk. “I’m not usually the one who misbehaves.”

Faith barked a laugh at that. “Lucky guy.” After a sec, she resumed her face-forward position, but things were much easier between them, out of nowhere. 

Buffy even thought she got why. /I’ve shown her I’m less of… what did she call me before? I don’t have so much of a stick up my ass anymore, and I’m not such a goody-two-shoes or whatever. She can work with me./ 

/Yeah, Faith. I’ve had to learn to figure out my lines and my gray areas. I’m not such a stupid kid anymore. I understand things a lot better now./

/I might even understand you. Just a little. Not that… Don’t get out of hand or anything. We’re not besties./

“So… how are things with you and the new vamp? You pickin’ out china patterns?”

Buffy bit her lip as she slowed for a yellow light. “Actually, yeah. We’re, uh… engaged.”

Faith stared at her, clearly taken aback. Whatever she had been shooting for with her fishing expedition, she had not expected that. Which, considering she had witnessed some of Buffy’s whole spinout-afterburn with the Angel/Angelus fiasco, Buffy wasn’t surprised at her amazement. “No shit.”

“Yeah. He… Yeah.” It sounded kind of dumb to say it to another Slayer, but… “I know, I could die tomorrow, and he’s gonna live forever, but…” She shrugged, uncertain how to even justify the whole thing right now. /I guess I wasn’t as jaded as I thought I was?/ Still, she felt weirdly like she should be, around her fellow Slayer. She felt abruptly juvenile, childish, wasn’t sure how to explain how really  _ not _ idiotic she and Spike were being about this, that it so wasn’t the same whole fantasyland thing she had had going with Angel. That this was different. That it was…

“Well, fuck, B.” Then, out of nowhere, Faith started to laugh; so hard, actually, that Buffy began to feel more than a little offended. She didn’t need the judgment.

“What?” she demanded.

“Oh, shit. Don’t get all pissy.” Waving a hand, Faith went off in another paroxysm, and Buffy had seriously never seen her sister-Slayer crack up like this. “Oh, fucking God…” she gasped, “Angel’s gonna shit a brick… Doesn’t he have… a massive fucking issue with… this Spike dude?” 

Buffy closed her eyes briefly, then had to open them because her time was up. As predicted, the light had turned green. /Gah!/ Hitting the gas with a little more spunk than necessary, she made a face at the windshield. “Are you gonna call him up and tell him? Because yeah; the first thing he’ll do is come racing up here and wanna throw down with Spike, and I’m so tired of being, like, this stupid chew-toy in his mind… like I’m even his problem anymore, you know? I don’t even get why he cares! We’ve been broken up for years now…”

“Honestly, I think he just decided you were some kind of prize he’d get if he was a good boy for long enough.” Sobering, Faith shook her head and leaned back against the seat again. “Which is a bunch of bullshit, but guys are idiots. I dunno. Angel’s a better guy than most, but vamp or no vamp, soul or no soul, he’s just as much of a douche in his own way as any guy. He’s decided you two are destined or whatever the fuck, so he’s gonna  _ make _ you his destiny whether you like it or not.”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. Pretty fuckin’ stupid, huh?”

It was amazing that Buffy had never considered that. She had considered ‘leftover possessive garbage from the old claim-thing’, and ‘leftover feelings from an ex-relationship’ thing, and ‘leftover guilt from the Angelus-thing’, and ‘leftover smooshy feelings from the only sex since whenever’ thing (though Spike’s diatribe on the subject had kind of undermined that particular argument). But the one thing she had never once considered was that Angel thought of her as some kind of… object. Like the Council did. Like everyone did who thought of her as the Slayer and not a person. Because to think of someone as a destiny or a prize to be earned was not to think of them as a separate being with their own trajectory, thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams and opportunities for growth and change, and that was just…

Squicky.

“It’s even bad for him, since I’m pretty damn sure he’s at least half in love with our girl Cordelia…”

“Wait, what?” To say that she was stunned was an understatement.

Faith lifted her eyes to the ceiling of the cab. “Yeah. They totally have the hots for each other. It’s wicked obvious. I swear to God, it practically makes me hurl every time I’m in the same room with those two. She has his ass wrapped right the hell around her little finger. She says jump, he smiles like a good little boy—did you know that idiot can smile? Like the fuckin’ sun, Buffy, swear to God—and prances off like a great big dope to do whatever the hell she wants. And she’s crazy supportive of him. It’s nuts. You wouldn’t even think she’s the same bitch who tried to run your high school. She talks to him like he’s a person. They sit around having all these smooshy heart-to-hearts all damn day, about everything from the bottom line to whether she’ll stake him if he ever disappoints her. It’s way disgusting.”

Buffy stared at Faith so long during this rundown that she almost crashed the DeSoto. 

“B, what the fuck! Watch where you’re going!”

“Shit!” With a hard swerve, she dragged the wheel over to get them back on the road before she ran over a couple of pedestrians on the sidewalk, heart jumping into her mouth at the near-vehicular manslaughter, but, just…  _ what? _

She simply could not credit the words that were falling out of Faith’s face. The account didn’t make even the tiniest bit of sense. Angel and  _ Cordelia? _

Angel  _ smiled? _

Cordelia was being…  _ thoughtful? _

“Wow,” Buffy answered after a long moment’s concentration on driving. “I don’t even know how to respond to that.”

“You think it’s weird to hear, you should try watching it. It’s like watching animals in the zoo. Bizarre as fuck. It’s like watching people learning how to communicate in the same language for the first time after being frozen in ice for a thousand years or some damn thing. Neither of them know how to be genuine human beings, but with each other they’re practically sweet.” Faith shook her head dismissively. “I don’t mind sayin’, B, the whole goddamn thing creeps me out. I was glad to get the fuck out of there and come up here to SunnyD for some fresh air.” She did a little shrug. “Besides; I told you Wes is down there, right? We made our peace, but that’s some fucked up vibe-age too. I don’t mind getting away for a while. Nice little hellmouth vacay. Dust some vamps, fuck up some other random demons… Soothing.”

/Eee./ “Uh… I get that, but maybe… hold off on the stake first and ask questions later mentality, okay? We have kind of a new system in place up here now. Which is… sort of the main reason the Council’s on the way. They’re mad at me.”

Faith eyed her for a sec, all sultry, dark eyes and pouty lips and the beginnings of pique. “What did you do, B? Something to screw up the status quo? Because they don’t like that shit. I thought they just wanted to lecture you for fucking another vamp. You know, ‘You’ve been a baaad girl, Slayer. Stop screwing the undead, blah fuckin’ blah’… Most of those tweedy jerks haven’t gotten laid since they were born; or at least 1969…”

Buffy sighed and turned in to park behind the store. “That’s part of it. Most of it, though, is…” Leaning back on the seat, she tugged out the keys and turned to face her sister-Slayer. “We have kind of a new world order thing going here in Sunnydale. Spike is the Master. He runs the town for me on the demon-side. And I… don’t kill anybody unless they mess up. Because I’ve learned that not every demon’s a baddie. I go after the baby-eaters, and the idiots who come to the hellmouth to party and tear up the town, and the ones trying to end the world. And yeah. We still stake unauthorized fledges… but the numbers are way down on those since Spike instituted a ‘you make ‘em, you both go down’ policy.” 

She tried a little shrug, wondering if Faith was seriously judging her. “Things are pretty… quiet for us lately. I spend a lot of time doing diplomacy, and talking with the local demon-leaders. We have trust, which means they, uh, report to me when someone in their community screws up, or is planning on screwing up, so we can solve it without people getting punished for it who aren’t really involved. Because a lot of the guys we used to go after were just kind of innocent bystanders, or guys who would probably have avoided that dumb ritual or whatever if they knew they had some other alternative, but they were scared to say no to the big fish in the little pond…”

She trailed off when Faith nodded thoughtfully. “Sounds kinda like how Angel gets down in LA.” She shot Buffy an odd look. “Don’t take this the wrong way, B, but a lot of what you’re doing now is actually stuff P… the Mayor did.”

Buffy winced. 

Faith held up one hand to forestall her defensive response. “Don’t get me wrong. He also paid off a lot of guys like Lurconis, and let ‘em just go right on doing their nasty shit. He’d pay guys with babies or whatever gross tribute. He let stuff happen, or even encouraged it, that was straight-up evil, so don’t think I’m comparing you to that. But the thing about… About trying to work with the demon world instead of exterminating it; using the whole diplomacy thing to keep an in with everybody? I get that. It makes sense. And especially that whole thing about using power structures that already exist… Like the Master vamp thing. And he was big on keeping outside ‘hooligans’ out of town, because they fucked up his town. He wasn’t down for that.”

Buffy sighed and looked away, wondering as she did so if it hurt Faith to talk about the guy who, whether he was an evil bastard or no, had at the very least treated her well when no one else had given a damn. She seemed to be taking it philosophically nowadays, but still. She had to feel some kind of way about it. “He was organized, I guess,” she allowed. “And, yeah. I’m trying to be more of a leader, and less of just… a tool.” She shrugged again. “Which, you know… The  _ Council’s _ not down for that.”

“Yeah, well… they never were down for us chicks livin’ off the leash.”

“Nope.”

They sat in silence for a long moment. Finally, Faith lifted one brow. “So, we gonna go into this building, whatever it is, or we just gonna sit out here and bake?”

Buffy frowned and leaned over to glance out through the driving slit. No vampire or Watcher over there under the rear awning. “Yeah, I guess. The boys seem to be done threatening each other, anyway.”

Faith leaned over the back of the seat to snag her knapsack thing. “Who’s threatening who? Anything I need to know about? Internal Scooby politics?”

“Huh? Oh. No… Giles was out here when I left, telling Spike he’d dust him if he ever hurt me, yadda manly blah.” /And vice-versa./ But that was… personal information.

Faith snorted as she reached for the door handle. “Like you wouldn’t just dust him yourself if he ever pissed you off.”

“I know, right?” Filled with a sudden and unaccountable flush of kinship, Buffy felt a whole hell of a lot better about having the other Slayer back in town. Things would probably always be a little weird between them… but at least Faith got that neither of them would ever need some dumb guy to protect them from some other dumb guy. “I mean, what even, huh?”

Moving to the back door of the store, she tugged it open. “So, here’s the training room. If, you know, you ever wanna throw a knife or something.” And remembering too late what she had once done to this girl with a knife, she winced. “Or, do some sparring, or throw a few punches, or…”

Faith tossed her a faintly ironic smirk, and preceded her through the door. “Nice setup. Dojo to the max. You got a dummy, and a target or six, and one of those kung-fu things… Sweet.”

“Yeah. It’s a nice place to blow off steam. Not that I don’t mostly do that with Spike, but…”

“Oh, I bet. It’s cool to have a vamp around to spar with. I still train with Angel a lot. It’d be nice to try out your guy’s moves, if he’s down, just to get a different perspective…” She wandered further in, missing the way Buffy’s hackles rose, then turned slightly, taking in the space. “If I remember, he’s a hell of a fighter.”

“Mmm,” Buffy answered, noncommittally.

Faith’s eyes flitted to hers, focused down to sharp points. “I’m not gonna try to fuck your guy, Buffy. I’m over that. Not that I don’t think he’s hot.” Her eyes wandered away again, ironic and amused. “Also, I don’t think he’s the cheating type. The way he acted when I tried… Even if I was down for a challenge, I doubt I could wear him down with industrial-grade sandpaper and one of those machines from shop class; you know the one?”

Buffy was startled enough to blurt out, “I… you took  _ shop?” _

“Hell yeah. Made a damn nice clock, and a really shitty birdhouse. So. What is this place, anyway?” Strutting a little, she headed for the inside door.

Still more than a little thrown by the candid change in the other Slayer, Buffy almost stuttered. “Uh… magick store. You know, sage, crystal balls, incense…”

“Huh. Beats a library.” She turned the knob.

“It has that too. Upstairs. Ish.”

“Huh. Good deal.” And, with her standard, self-protective swagger in place, Faith opened the inside door and pushed through, and wow. How had Buffy never realized how much her sister-Slayer was like Spike? 

She was way putting on a huge mask right now so she could walk face-first into a room full of people who she thought probably hated her, ready to face them all down like she didn’t give a damn; an act as familiar to Buffy by now as one of her own shirts.

Following Faith into the short hall and into the store, Buffy pulled up the rear and just watched as the group straightened and resolved itself into uncertain not-quite-welcome. “Hey, guys.”

“Hello, Faith.” Of course, Giles would speak up first. 

“Yes! Welcome to the Magic Box!” Anya piped up next, because she was always ready to get a sales pitch in. “I hope that you won’t think that everything in here is free to you, unlike the witches, since you’re not into magicks!”

Buffy held back a chortle at Faith’s taken aback expression. To her recollection, her sister-Slayer hadn’t encountered Anya during her last sojourn in town, and hadn’t exactly spent a whole heck of a lot of time with her before that, since Anya had only really started to hang out a lot with the group after she had removed herself from it. “Uh, no, not big on this stuff, really.” 

“Well, then… good.”

“Hey, Faith. I don’t know if you remember me at all. My name’s Jonathan…”

Faith narrowed her eyes at the tiny guy, clearly fighting to place him. 

“It’s okay. I probably wasn’t on your radar.”

“What do you do in the group?” she asked him, blunt as ever.

“Magicks. Read a few dead languages. Summon stuff.”

“Huh.” Her eyes drifted to Andrew, hovering in the background looking all intimidated. “Who’s the boyfriend?”

Willow hissed sharply in warning, but it was too late. Andrew’s head popped up, eyes widening in shock. “I’m not… I don’t… My name’s Andrew! And I like girls!”

“Oh. My mistake.” Faith’s mouth had creased into a knowing smile. “Good to meet you, Andrew.”

“Ixnay on the outinghay when they’re otnay eadyray!” Willow insisted, glaring.

Faith snorted volubly. Glancing behind her, she leaned back, canting an elbow to catch the edge of the counter, and crossed her legs at the ankle. “Speaking of, how’s that gay life treating you, Willow?” And she gave a genial nod at Tara to include her in the overall question.

Tara lifted her chin. Willow, though, straightened and threw her arm over Tara’s shoulders, all defensive pride. “It’s great. We’re great! We’re wonderful, even! Right, baby?”

Tara turned her head to eye Willow with one of her assessing expressions, then turned back to face Faith down in a way she definitely could not have done six months before; calm and secure. “I’m sorry you’re so lonely. But if it helps any, I think you won’t be for long. You just have to let somebody in.”

Faith froze very briefly… then went limber again. “Not lonely, Tinker-Bell. Independent.”

“Yeah. Sure. And you like it that way.” Now, Tara had a little, knowing smile on her lips, and wow, she had come a long way in the last few months.

“Damn straight.” Faith turned away from the girls to nod at Xander. “How’s it going, sparky?”

Xan’s expression tightened a little. “I’ve been doing good, Faith. How you holdin’ up?”

“The usual.” She tilted her head a little to take in Anya. “Demon-girl here keepin’ you in hand?”

“Yes, I am,” Anya answered firmly. “So please keep your hands to yourself.”

“Oh, I’m done sampling.” Faith gave an indolent sort of nod. “He’s all yours, chica.” And her eyes drifted up and down Xander’s body in that way she had that was calculated to put everyone’s back up who might remotely be involved in the conversation. “Know he does okay as long as someone’s there to keep him in line.”

“Oookaaay,” Buffy broke in… But Faith, of course, still felt she had something to prove. And she had saved the best for last. 

“Speaking of firm hands…” And she moved that whole up-and-down gaze to Spike where he leaned—as an aside, in almost exactly the same way—over there, halfway across the room against the pillar deal, left shoulder pressed to the upright, left hand playing with his latest lighter, right hand snugged into the front pocket of his jeans. “Damn, B,” she said then, and dragged her eyes back up along the length of his body to his face, “I can see why you’re not about to let this one get away.”

/Oh, jeez./

Spike, of course, played along, because he probably recognized a fellow word-fencer or something. He even did the thing where he pulled his lower lip into his teeth. Gave a little nod, and returned the body-scan. “Haven’t changed much since the last time,” he pointed out, and pushed off the wall to straighten and tuck away the lighter. “Recall I kicked your ass.” His eyes burned on hers.

Faith did a little smoldering back, damn her. “I’ll take a rematch anytime, Blondie. I’m a little more on my game these days. And I hear you practice every day.”

“I’m in shape,” he allowed. He sounded amused.

The amusement was catching. “So’m I.”

/Are we serious, right now?/ “Alright, alright,” Buffy broke in, and seriously considered throwing a bucket of water—or maybe a couple of indiscriminate knives—into this party. “So, anyway…”

“Told you, I wasn’t gonna poach, B,” Faith interrupted. She gave Spike another brief-but-appreciative once-over. “Wouldn’t mind a little exercise, though. Girl gets antsy sometimes.”

Spike chuckled and leaned back against his pillar, setting the point of it square between his shoulder-blades. “Wouldn’t be a Slayer if you didn’t.”

Grinning, Faith turned back to the clearly-uncomfortable masses. “Well. Now that’s settled, I think I’m gonna run over to the Burger Barn…”

“The Burger Barn’s gone,” Andrew piped up, still a little sullen. “Those crazed motorcycle demons burned it down last year.”

“Well… shit. That sucks.”

“Yeah.” Buffy shrugged it off. “They torched a lot of the old haunts.”

“What a bunch of bastards. Huh.” Face twisting, she leaned around, trying for a glance out of the big bay window. It was mostly obscured by dangling trinkets, though, and that one big display of geodes and statuettes. “What the hell is there to eat that’s within walking distance? I’m starving, man.”

“There’s a bagel place nextdoor,” Jonathan put in.

Faith made a disgusted face.

“Sandy’s Sandwich is still there.”

She turned back to Buffy, looking like she’d been proffered a savior’s hand from the bottom of a deep well. “Oh, man, that’s music to my ears. Damn, I forgot that place. They have the best damn pastrami…”

“I remember you liked it.” Running around town with Faith; best friends, for a while. Fighting together, side-by-side, evenly matched. The way she did now with Spike. The clean, wild thrill of it. No thought. Just fun, youthful exhilaration. Arm-in-arm around the school, around town. Her friends hadn’t understood, of course. Wil had been so confused, even a little hurt… but none of them  _ could _ understand. None of them were Slayers; none of them knew what it felt like. To have the burden, but also to have… the freedom; in the dance. In the movement. To lose yourself utterly in the physical… and to feel the rush. To need to get it out, somehow, after. The wild whirl of dancing in the Bronze. The insane, sweaty sensuality of it. The out-of-control urges. The hungers, the ferocious edge, the thing only they could understand about each other, and share, with quick glances, and half-crazed laughs, and secret smiles, and…

/Okay, Spike, maybe there might’ve been something, back then, before it all went nuts. It was just, I was too young to see it./

“Hell yeah, I liked it. Alright. It’s been real, folks, but I guess I better head out. I’m bushed. Gotta go get a hoagie and then find a spot over at the home sweet motel so I can crash...”

“No!” It came out a little more forcefully than Buffy had meant it to; but then, that motel… 

Just, no. No one she… cared about should ever stay at that place, ever again.

Already halfway to the front door, Faith turned to regard her with an odd expression on her face, like she was trying to read words in an unfamiliar language. “What’s up, B?”

Feeling weirdly wrong-footed, Buffy shook her head. “It’s just… you’re not staying at the motel.”

“I’m not?”

“No. Um… The thing is…” The thing was, they had had a whole meeting about this subject only a little while before Faith had been due to arrive. It was why they had all been so on edge before she’d left to go pick the girl up. 

They’d had the meeting at Revello, so they could include Mom. After all, her mother had a stake in the whole ‘Faith coming to town’ situation, after the last time. She definitely deserved to weigh in. 

_ “So, my deal is… I know she’s done everyone some harm, but… I don’t want her staying at the motel again. It’s just… I think it’s a bad way to start things off. For a lot of reasons. I mean… She’s coming here voluntarily, to help us out with the Council, you know? And… I kinda feel like, if we’d’ve just… I dunno. Been more welcoming when she first came here, maybe…”  _ Buffy had darted her eyes to her Watcher _. “She was only a little older than us, you know. Living alone in a crappy motel. And I don’t know if any of you guys have been to that place, but it’s…” _

_ “A dive,”  _ Spike put in grimly.  _ “Drug dealers an’ the like. Not somewhere a young chit should be stoppin’.” _

_ “Yeah. It’s… pretty nasty. There’s… probably pimps, and…” _

_ “Yeah, it was pretty gross,”  _ Willow had allowed, backing them.  _ “It would’ve scared me half to death a couple years ago. In high school…” _ She’d sounded regretful, upon reflection. 

_ “The thing is, if we try to keep her out of there, who can she stay with? I mean, I know it’s asking a lot to poll all of us. It’s asking a lot of trust, even, but… When someone’s trying to change, you have to trust a little, or they don’t get the chance to show you what they’re capable of.” _ And she’d squeezed Spike’s hand, bearing down tight. Seeking strength.

Xander had spoken up first, a tiny wince decorating his features.  _ “Look. I get what you’re trying to do, Buffster. I… might even consider it, but I’ve got a full house. And she’d probably hate it there anyway. It’s the bachelor pad right now, you know?”  _ Which, he had a point on that. Now that he had a steady income, Jonathan had just moved out of his family’s home to rent Xander’s spare room, which was cool from the ‘kicking Xander some cash as a roommate’ department. But the unfortunate codicil to that whole deal was that they practically had that little dork Andrew crashing on the couch every third night or whatever; basically whenever he was mad at his parents or they were mad at him, or he needed somewhere to camp out that was magicks-friendly.

/Crap, that rules out Xander./ And Giles didn’t have a spare room. /Well, Wil’s always with Tara, so I guess if she’s okay with it, we can give up some of our sexy-space for a little while and Faith can use that bed. Or, I mean, she could probably put up with our shenanigans. I doubt anything we did would ever shock her, but…/ But Buffy didn’t think she could bring herself to boink her guy with an audience around which consisted of the too-experienced and snarky alter-Slayer.

/Well, we’ll still have the crypt. And it means we can keep an eye on her. Of course, we’d have to find a way to get her in and out of the building. Maybe Wil and Tara can, like, magick us a fake keycard thing that acts like a student ID?/

/Of course, we’d be totally breaking school rules, and if the dean found out they’d kick me and Wil both out of housing, which is… eee. What if one of the other students reports us?/

Well, if she was really committed to keeping Faith out of that gross-ass motel, maybe that was a chance she was just going to have to take. After all, no one had given her shit about Spike so far. /Heck, considering all the crap he’s said, maybe everyone in the dorm’ll think we’re a threesome. Which is… I’m not gonna even go there, but if it keeps me from getting tossed out of school, whatever. Let ‘em think what they want./  _ “Okay, what if we sneak her into the dorm, and then maybe you can give her some kind of spelled card or something, Wil, so she can get in and out. You can come up with something, right? You and Tara? Or…” _

_ “Why doesn’t she just stay in the basement?” _

Buffy had ground to a halt to stare at her mother in amazement.  _ “Why what?” _

Mom had looked thoughtful.  _ “I understand what you said, Buffy, and I agree. And…” _ She shot a sidelong look at Spike, filled with something that might have been instigation.  _ “The cot down there is going begging, since for some reason you’ve never really slept in it. Not since that first night, to keep up appearances…” _

Spike had actually managed to blush a little.  _ “Mum, I…” _

_ “Never mind, young man. Though, if you thought you were sneaky, creeping upstairs like you did, you’re an idiot.” _

Spike had thrown up his hands, clearly at his wits’ end at being called an idiot by every Summers woman in existence.

_ “Mom,” _ Buffy had breathed, absolutely flabbergasted by the offer,  _ “she  _ assaulted _ you!” _

_ “And we’re offering her a second chance. Trusting her to turn over a new leaf, right?” _

_ “So you’re gonna trust her to… To sleep downstairs, and… And, just…” _

Spike had lifted a brow at Buffy, looking curious more than anything. _ “Pet, she’s always trusted me, and I’ve killed more people than that chit’s drawn warm breaths.” _

She supposed he had a point. But still.

Giles had chipped in then.  _ “Should that offer fall through, there is always the couch in my flat. Which, granted, is a deal less private, but should also suffice, in the short-term. And, considering that I, Joyce, not you, am the Watcher who failed her, I should most likely make the first offer.” _

Mom had shrugged.  _ “Whatever works. As long as we keep these… men… away from my babies, I don’t give a damn.” _

Spike’s startled blink over being classified, with Buffy, as one of Mom’s ‘babies’ had been a sight to see.  _ “Ah… right then. So the chit’ll have a choice.”  _

Buffy had nodded, still more than a little floored—though, no doubt, a lot less so than she thought Faith would be—by the offers.  _ “More of a choice than she’s ever had, I think.” _

Buffy bit her lip, wondering just how exactly to explain all those options to the other girl, now, without sounding like an idiot, or over-explaining too much, or…

“The thing is,” Spike broke in, “you came up here to do us a favor, innit? Help us face down those Council tossers. Lend Slayer-weight when we throw down with that great load of wankers. No reason you should stay at that shitehole while you do it. And, Joyce agrees, so she’s offered to let you bed down on the cot in the basement… on the good faith agreement you’ll behave. Or, if you’re not comfortable with that…”

“Should you feel uncomfortable with Joyce’s very kind offer, considering past events, you can spend your evenings on my sofa. Which is, admittedly, not altogether the most comfortable of places to rest, and is also in the midst of my living room, so it does not afford all that much privacy. I would imagine, however, that it might in fact be slightly more comfortable than a cot in a basement. But then, Joyce has only the basement left to offer, and that only because though it is technically Spike’s domain…” 

“That’s kind of crap, though,” Xander put in. “Don’t lie. Doesn’t he really sleep with you when he’s at the house, Buffy?”

“Officially, or unofficially?” Buffy asked, and batted her eyelashes.

“Which is to say,” Giles went on, “the space is open because our resident vampire has apparently decided to eschew those quarters in favor of behaving the thoroughgoing rake…”

“That’s a bit harsh, Watcher. Like to curl up with my girl, innit? What’s so bloody wrong with that?”

Faith was looking way startled. Her eyes flickered to Buffy’s, uncertain and incredulous beneath the thin layer of swagger. “Uh…”

Buffy sighed. “How about you go get a sandwich, and then you can come talk to Mom. And after that, if you feel like you’re too weirded out about it, you can camp out at Giles’ place. But if you’re okay with the basement, you can do that.” /But for at least the first night or two, Spike and I will so be staying upstairs to keep an eye on you./

Faith watched her for a sec, eyes, in that instant, absolutely unguarded. Then the smoky shield came back down over her face, and the swaggering self-assurance returned. “Sure, B. Whatever you say. I’m out. I got a hot pastrami-on-rye with my name on it waiting out there…” She resumed her trek for the front door. “See you in a few.”

“Okay.”

The bell tinkled as she made her escape. And probably stood there for a second or two with her back against it, trying to get herself back together. Because it was all an act. 

It usually was, with big bads who were all smooshy underneath, and why had it taken Buffy this long to recognize that Faith was really just another one of those same kinds?

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
(Yes, I enjoy fixing relationships. Yes, I know my stories have all accidentally hit the same tropes at the same time. Don't look at me like that. It was an accident of timing.   
  
The way they do it comes out differently, because the characters are in way different places, okay?)  



	27. Chapter 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the support of late!!!  
> Ok, so here's where I introduce a story element that I thought would be, at best, an ephemeral addition, but which became way too fun way too quickly, and then just wouldn't freaking leave, and ended up becoming, entirely unexpectedly, a wildly useful fixture in the landscape of this revised Scoobies/Sunnydale version of things (and, eventually, a necessary, if unplanned, plot-mover). 
> 
> Don't hate me. It wasn't my fault. Also, I like to pretend that I know what I'm doing. (Mostly it's just the characters completely getting away from me and doing whatever the hell they want to do, by this point, but I will say that wolf_shadoe assures me the addition continues to be fun/add spice to the sitch, so... Suspend your disbelief?)
> 
> Stuff from "Listening To Fear" in here, but not much of it is dialogue, if anything, I think. I rewrote the hell out of this episode.

“Mmm.”

“Buffy.”

“Mmm?”

“Wake up, pet. It’s Red.”

Buffy flopped a hand out across the bed, feeling for the phone. She had a vague awareness that the sound she had heard in her semi-dream-state had maybe been an electronic vibration, and not a bee buzzing around her head, but…

“The witches saw a meteor landing. They went to check it out, and turns out it was actually an egg or some such shite. They think it hatched some sort of soddin' extraterrestrial demon.”

That got her awake. She cracked her eyes to blink up at him, startled but coming quickly back to full awareness. “A what hatched a who?”

“Hell if I bloody know. They can’t get Rupert. Left a message. I’d imagine comin’ from outer space puts it off the bleedin’ reservation, though, pet.” He was struggling back into his t-shirt as he spoke.

Thank goodness she had a vampire on hand who was nocturnal and could keep an eye on her phone for her while he cuddled her to sleep, or she would definitely have slept right through this one. It sounded like one for the books. “I don’t even know how to respond to that,” she answered, sitting up in bed. Giving her eyes a brisk rub and her head a stern shake, she glanced around her aimlessly, wondering where exactly her clothes had ended up. (They had absolutely broken house rules earlier. On the floor, so there would be no giveaway noises of beds and walls, and what Mom didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, right? Some people’s Slayers were feeling slightly territorial, and maybe it would’ve been better to do said reclaiming somewhere else, but since they had to be here to keep an eye on the unknown quantity that was Faith… Well. One thing had led to another, and stuff.)

Bending over, Spike lifted the bedskirt a little, made a swiping motion, and unceremoniously handed her her blouse. 

“Thanks.”

“Mm.” He was already stalking over to her panties drawer to dig out a new pair for her, which he tossed to the foot of the bed, this followed swiftly by last night’s jeans and a pair of socks. 

Gathering up said items, she stood and made for the bathroom. He was already at the window, no joke, sniffing at the night air as if he could smell the invading life-form. She left him to it and headed across the hall.

“Alright,” she whispered at the door a few minutes later. He exited to slip briefly into the bathroom for an exceedingly abbreviated toilette, then joined her to head down the stairs at his usual station. She had her hand on the front door when a faint clatter from the kitchen made them both whip around sharply. 

“Hey. Where are you two sneaking off to? Something going down?”

Faith. Damn. Buffy had totally forgotten for a sec that the other Slayer was even here. “Uh… yeah. Maybe. There was some kind of… meteorite thing, I guess. Except… something, like, hatched out of it?”

“No shit.” Another clatter, and Faith was wending her way through the dining room to join them, licking peanut butter off of her fingers. She had a graham cracker smeared with same in the other hand. “Sorry; had the munchies. Mostly just restless. Can I come? I need to kick something’s ass. I’m betting if it came from the Great Beyond, I’m allowed to fuck it up, right? It won’t be on your list of friendlies?”

“We’ll do a standard meet and greet,” Spike answered, sounding amused, “but yeah. Most like.”

“Sweet.” She held out the graham cracker. “Hungry, B?”

Buffy shook her head and turned for the door. “No, I’m good, thanks.”

Faith shrugged. “Your call.” Her eyes flitted briefly to Buffy’s neck, then, and Buffy realized all too late that as her hair was up in a ponytail right now, preparatory to a possible fight, certain relationship values were being clearly exposed. 

Faith’s eyes flickered up to Spike’s, then, suddenly darkly amused and full of worlds of wicked surmise. “Guessin’ you’re all good.”

Spike’s voice went sardonic. “I’ll do.”

They piled into the DeSoto, and after about fifteen minutes of driving, came to a halt across Highway 101, where Breakers Woods started to peter out in the hills behind Parma Park and all the rich people’s houses. “So, where…” Buffy began.

Spike held up a hand, having taken up point. “Smell Red and Glinda. And somethin’ ruddy strange. Just that way.”

Well, far be it from Buffy to question her lover’s enhanced vampire schnoz. “Can I just put it out there that, ew, and yay for me that I don’t have to be the one to do the sniffing in this relationship?”

“Hours I spend facedown in your quim make up for any number of other smells in the world, Slayer.”

“Hell. He’s a sweet-talker, isn’t he?”

Buffy was really glad it was too dark for anyone to see her blushing.

“Does he just talk a good game,” Faith went on, conversationally curious, “or is he really so much of a giver?”

“Um, do I actually have to answer that out loud?”

“Damn, B, you’re actually blushing. Shit; he must be  _ good!” _

“So, how close are we?” Buffy picked up the pace, half-jogging, now.

“Hey, Blondie. Got any brothers?”

Spike speed-chuckled as they rounded through a little copse of scrub oak. 

And came upon a body.

Wil and Tara stood in front of it, staring down at a former man and his potbelly and his round, pasty cheeks. They looked anxious and regretful as one might expect, considering. Buffy sighed as she passed them to move a little closer. “Well. Something obviously got him.”

“Poor fat fuck,” Faith agreed. “Probably couldn’t run away fast enough.”

Buffy moved to crouch next to the corpse… and was forestalled by a swift Spike-arm, shooting out to catch her. “Hold up, Slayer. He doesn’t smell right.”

“Okay?”

Shaking his head, Spike tilted it for a second, sidled around to eye the dead man’s face with that predator's grace of his. His tension was briefly off the charts, making Buffy's skin crawl with the overflow. After a sec, though, it slacked off enough for her to breathe again, and his shoulders squared once more. Nodding a little as if agreeing with something, Spike pointed with his chin. “Poor sod has something in his mouth.”

Faith frowned and shifted slightly to take a peek. “Huh. Yeah he does. It’s totally full. Some kinda gummy black shit.” She shot a glance over at Spike. “You think he suffocated?”

“Enough of that got into the sod’s airway, yeah. Willin’ to bet.” His mouth flattened to a thin line. “Know a few species kill that way. Do it to preserve a meal for later. ‘Cept, this one left his spoils behind. Seems it was either interrupted, or this tosser wasn’t killed for supper.” His eyes slid over to meet Buffy’s, dark with uncomfortable inference. “Makes one wonder just what the bloody hell else would motivate it, then.”

Buffy made a face. “Either way, something’s out there. Something lethal. And gross.”

“Yay,” Willow put in. When Buffy glanced at her, “I mean, uh, locator spell? Tara and I could, you know…” She wiggled her fingers. 

“Sure!” Tara agreed. “I mean, we’d probably need to draw the bead from the originating spot, and then we could do some sort of…” She turned to Willow, hopeful. “Remember the one we tried the other day, with the big, fluorescent trail?”

“Oh, yeah! Oh, hey, Buffy. So, there’s this spell we tried with Jonathan the other day, where if you do it right, you can make the thing you’re following’s trail light up all bright and shiny, so you can follow it without missing it…”

“That sounds great, you two. Where…” 

“Oh.” Tara made a face. “It was… um… that way?” She waved a hand in a sort of northeasterly direction, looking abruptly flustered as she stared into the darkness of trees and mulch.

Willow followed her hand-wave, frowned. “I swear, I thought we could just retrace our steps, but it’s a lot darker now, and we were just… freaked. And then we saw this guy, and… Yeah. It was kinda… that way…”

/Unhelpful./ Buffy turned to Spike. “You think you can sniff out where it came from?”

Spike looked mildly disgusted. “No bloody problem, love.” He turned sharply on his heel and started in a direction that, it must be said, was not at all the way the girls had been pointing, but almost directly north of their position. “This way.”

“Jonathan might know what kind this one is, too,” Willow went on, rising to follow. “And if he doesn’t, Andrew would probably be able to figure it out. Between the two of them they’re, like, this massive encyclopedia of random demons…”

“Good,” Buffy agreed as she picked up the pace behind her vamp. “Call ‘em. Put ‘em on it…”

“Right. Yeah.” Trailing behind them, the girls pulled out their phones.

Faith moved up to bracket Buffy on her right. “So. Handy to have a vamp around. Kinda like having your own personal bloodhound, huh?”

Spike growled a little as he strode ahead.

“He’s very helpful, but he’s not my dog, Faith.”

Faith smirked. “Yeah?” Pivoting around, she started walking briskly backward to eye Spike with interest. “Bet you’d look damn good in a collar, Blondie.”

/Oh, God./ “Okay, you know what?”

“Did I wear one for Buffy, Faith, I’d wear it proud, and no one in this soddin’ town would say word one about it. They all already know where I belong.”

Faith lifted a brow, and a broad grin crossed her face. “Well, hot damn. B, don’t let this one get away, huh? You’ve got him wicked well-trained!”

Buffy bit her lip, hard, to keep from saying a few choice things to her sister-Slayer; most of them things she might never be able to take back. 

Luckily for all concerned, right about then the scattered trees opened up to a sort of a clearing; one marred by a long, smoking channel carved into the earth by apparent impact with some massive, supersonic… thing. There were still a few smoldering embers in the huge groove, and the whole wide copse was filled with the smell of burning leaves and newly-turned earth.

At the end of several hundred feet of successively-deeper trench lay a crater-like dike of disturbed dirt, all piled up around a huge, solid globule of rough, grayish, blobby stone about four and a half feet tall and maybe six feet long; kind of a tear-shape laying on its side with the point going off to the right.

It was a fairly incredible sight.

Wil lowered her phone. “Okay, when we found it, it was from behind. From this side, the… landing looks a lot more… Wow.”

Tara, still holding hers to her ear, murmured something in agreement that sounded like, “Oh, Goddess…”

Spike moved cautiously closer, like he wasn’t completely flammable, and crouched right near the edge of the huge divot in the earth. “Here’s where the soddin’ thing escaped, Slayer. It has a hole in the bottom.” 

Closing with him, Buffy squatted in his wake to peer into the gloom. And saw what he’d caught with his ever-more-dark-adapted gaze.

This wasn’t, like, a tiny thing, like some kind of little spider-demon or something. This was something substantial; at least small-person-sized. “Okay, crap.”

“Somethin’ worth worryin’ about came out of it, for sure.”

Faith drew even with them to crouch just behind Buffy. “I mean, considering it spat that shit into dude’s mouth, I figure we already knew that, huh?”

“Uh…” Willow spoke up from behind them, “alien? Kinda new for us. That can’t be good.” 

“No,” Buffy agreed softly. “But I’m not gonna spend a lot of time worrying about whether it comes in peace. If this is our spit-killer-culprit-thing, then it’s on the kill-list.”

“Klaatu Barada Nikto,” Spike muttered in something that sounded like agreement.

“Okay?” Buffy answered, thrown.

“Never mind, Slayer.”

Faith pushed herself up, hands to thighs. “Well, boys and girls… time to whack us an alien. And there’s something I never thought I’d get to say.”

Buffy joined her in pushing herself upright. “Ditto.”

“If we can stand the stench,” Spike agreed, and, rising, pivoted on his heel to exit stage left. “Bloody foul.”

“So, I’m guessing you’re not a fan,” Buffy answered, taking his arm.

“Slayer, I wanna kill the fucking thing just to revenge the insult on my nose.”

“Well, that’s straightforward enough.” She lifted her gaze to the witchy duo. “Anything from boy-witch central?”

“Uh, not so far,” Tara answered. “Jonathan says there were a few weird little rumor-type-things in ancient Mesopotamia, about monsters from the sky, but nothing really about their habits. Just something about ‘the utterings of madmen’.”

“Yeah,” Willow put in, “and I guess Andrew’s never heard of anything like it in his whole summoning-guides deal. Giles hasn’t picked up yet…”

“That’s not like him. Do you think he’s okay?” Buffy felt more than a little concerned.

Spike grunted. “Sod’s probably ignoring the thing. Else he’s turned his ringer off. He’s one of those newer phones, innit, has the switch on the base?”

“Oh. Right.” Buffy frowned. “Why would he…”

Spike shook his head, a mildly disgusted expression flitting across his face. “No worries. I’ll wake him. Teach him to act the fool. Prat’s likely tied one on after our conversation, and now he’s taking a bit of a time-out before his lads come to town. Wants a lie-in…”

Faith barked an amused laugh. “G-man’s been getting wasted over this whole thing? Wow. He’s really freaked out, huh?”

Buffy made a worried face, remembering the serious guilt-trip Spike had recently laid on her Watcher. “There’s been a lot going on.”

“Huh.” 

In lieu of even remotely getting into it, Buffy lifted her gaze to Wil and Tara. “So… now we know where this thing came from…”

“Oh. Right. Yeah.” Willow lowered her phone. “What do you think, baby? Can we do it with what we have on hand?”

“Oh. Um, yeah, I think so.”

Moments later the two witches were sitting cross-legged, facing one another a few feet away from the still-smoldering trench, while Spike and the two Slayers leaned against a couple of trees a dozen feet further back and watched. Spike was smoking. At one point, Faith asked to bum a cigarette from him, a request he absently granted by passing her the one he’d already lit and starting up another one for himself, which… Faith smoked, now? 

Buffy was surprised, but not. It did, after all, seem like kind of a Faith thing to do, and anyway she was too distracted to pay a whole lot of attention to the casual intimacy of smokers, too busy watching the witches with an eagle eye. 

After setting up shop with a few tiny velvet bags of herbs and things and one little ceramic bowl of, probably, salt, they did their scattering and muttering, looking intently into each other’s eyes the entire time in that heavily sensual way they had. When they started, they held hands crossways over the circle they had made, an electric vibe sparking immediately between them, like they were welded together. Here and there they switched hands, but kept their grip across the intervening space, doing a sort of swishy, wave-like movement, like they were underwater and chanting as one with eyes locked. 

The energy between them crackled.

“Holy fuck,” Faith opined at one point, under her breath, and straightened to unfold one arm from under the other. She slowly lowered her cigarette, eyebrow raised. “Now I get why Wil took a walk on the wild side. This Wicca shit is straight up sex.”

Buffy shrugged. “For them it is. I think it’s like slaying.”

“No doubt.”

The energy built around the chanting. The chanting picked up in intensity. The paired voices picked up in speed and volume. A light seemed to kindle in the two girls’ faces, and the hairs on Buffy’s arms rose, the hackles on the back of her neck. She shivered, rubbing there as they built and built and built to a crescendo, and then…

At once, they flung their heads back. The light inside them seemed to rush outward, shooting from the center of their tiny, encapsulated space, and from their paired being. It exploded away, arrowing toward the meteor, to limn the edges of the hole… then blasted away, tracing a road of incandescent fire along the bottom of the trench and away through the woods, in a direct line to the corpse they had passed along the way. 

The afterimage on Buffy’s eyes was serious.

The bright, flame-like thing, supernatural and wavering, sank into the ground, leaving behind a glowing, lightly pulsating marker, like someone had embedded a fluorescent bulb roughly the width of an anaconda just beneath the local soil. They would be able to follow it as long as it remained extant.

“Well, that was a hell of a thing,” Spike drawled.

Panting, still gazing into one another’s eyes in clear lustiness, the girls nodded. “It should… stay for a while,” Tara got out, gasping a little. 

“Uhuh,” Wil agreed, also hoarse. “Maybe… an hour?” 

They never took their eyes off of each other.

Buffy thought they might need a minute or five alone. “Okay, so uh… let’s go… follow it.”

Spike pushed off of the tree, relinquishing his reclining position. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Let’s do that.” He narrowed his eyes, hooding them a little, then pitched away the butt of his cigarette, ground it under his toe. “Off we go, then?”

“Mmm.” Leading the way, Buffy struck out along the line of light in the soil, Spike in her wake, while Faith stubbed out her butt on the tree’s bark and followed, dusting off her hands. 

Behind them, she thought she heard Willow murmur, “Oh, wooow,” and Tara answer, “I knoooow…”

/Lalalaaaa, don’t want to hear!/

The trail, as expected, popped out of the trench as it shallowed to make a beeline for dead dude. Shortly after that, it angled right off into town, crossing under the freeway overpass. 

It was heading in the direction of downtown.

They were just about to step into the car when Buffy heard a voice catch her absolutely by surprise. It sounded vaguely familiar. “Hey. Uh… Buffy.”

Pulling a hard one-eighty, Buffy blinked in shock. Standing behind her, at… what was that term, when they had their legs kind of a little apart and their arms behind their backs? At ease? Parade-rest? In a black beret and a black, cable-knit-looking sweater ensemble, was that guy Graham, who used to be friends with Riley Finn.

Spike immediately started growling. 

“Damn,” Faith put in immediately. “Who’s the  _ soldier? _ He’s kind of a stud.”

Graham’s eyes flickered to Faith’s, then jerked right back to Buffy, wary and focused.

Buffy didn’t answer. This Graham guy wasn’t doing anything threatening—he didn’t have any fancy crossbow thing pulled on her guy, for instance—but he did have a pistol at his hip, and anyway, she was taking no chances. Not after the way Riley had jumped them a couple weeks back. As such, she didn’t even break gait; just strode right up into the dude’s space, grabbed the collar of his poly-blend sweater, and yanked his face down into hers. “Listen,” she informed him fiercely, “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I am sick and tired of you boys following me and my guy around. So why don’t you get the hell away from me and toddle back to the nearest army base, stat, before you end up on the ground having a heart attack like your boy Finn.”

Graham didn’t even bother to detach his hands from behind his back, much less attempt to pry hers off of his collar. Clearly he recalled her previous shows of strength, and knew it would be a losing battle. His expression was strained, maybe slightly fearful as he kept his eyes front, his gaze pointed directly over her shoulder, and nodded once, jaw working a little. “Understood, ma’am. My orders weren’t to follow you. That’s not why I’m here. I was actually tasked with discovering if the meteor impact nearby constitutes a threat to the local environment.”

Buffy hissed and promptly released his sweater. “Yeah? Why you?”

A muscle in his cheek twitched. He still didn’t meet her eye. “Because I was in the Initiative. We get the weird assignments. Sometimes they’re good. Sometimes they’re bad.”

Buffy scoffed, pushing away. “Don’t give me that crap. I know why you stayed. That captain or colonel or whatever he was told me when I got them to de-chip Spike. He said a few of you volunteered to stay behind to keep an eye on me. Riley, obviously; he jumped us just a few weeks back…”

Graham shook his head. “I didn’t…” He made a strange face; almost a wince. “That’s not why I stayed. I…” Then, very suddenly, he exhaled and relaxed, just a little. “Permission to speak freely, ma’am? Without getting my head ripped off?”

/Oh, what the hell./ At least the guy was being appropriately respectful. With a wave of her hand, Buffy gestured for him to chill.

Looking relieved, Graham dropped his arms, took a step back, and, darting a few quick, hunted looks first at her, then Spike, then, curiously, at Faith, he shot a brief, anxious glance at the glowing line in the leaf-mulch. “Ah… I took a flyer and, uh, followed that this way. Is it, um… dangerous?”

Buffy made a face. “No, but it’s gonna fade out soon, and we need to follow it, so make this quick.”

Nodding, Graham exhaled and turned his gaze back to her. “I stayed behind because Riley did. I didn’t think he was in a… very good state of mind.” His light eyes were troubled and, Buffy thought, guileless as they landed back on hers. “I was worried. I thought he might end up… getting dangerous. He was talking crazy, after everything last year. Acting all obsessed. So I chose to stay. We got choice of duties, so I signed up for a two-year extension with the local post. Funny thing…” And, for the first time, a brief touch of what might even have passed for amusement filtered into his expression, “they get a lot of transfers out of there. They especially had a lot of requests right after that business with the bikers; so they seemed really glad to take any volunteers coming in. They snapped up me and Gates right away...”

“Gates?” 

“Forrest.”

Buffy blinked… and when the name registered, got a little worried. She definitely remembered that guy. /Really angry. Definitely prejudiced./ “Forrest stayed.”

Graham turned wary, watching her. “He, uh, stayed for Ri. They’re best bros. Actually… I kinda think…” He shook his head. “Never mind. Anyway, once I realized Gates was also staying, I knew I needed to sign an extension here, even if it was a career-killer...”

Buffy frowned at that. Why would it be a career-killer to stay here? Unless… 

She remembered officer-asshole mentioning that all the surviving Initiative guys were going to be offered choice assignments elsewhere. /Maybe choosing to stay in a backwater like Sunnydale isn’t exactly a good way to climb the military ladder./

Huh. Maybe this guy was being real, after all.

“I was worried that he might try for some kind of weird revenge or something,” Graham continued, sounding way serious about his buddy Gates. “He has issues with the… locals.” Bright, crystal-clear eyes watched her, without treachery. “I… was concerned.”

Buffy sighed heavily and put her face into her hand for a moment. /I so don’t need this right now./ “What about you?” she asked, without lifting her head. “Do you have issues with the ‘locals’?”

There was a long pause; long enough to cause her to lift her gaze to regard him coolly. 

Graham was watching her steadily. His eyes flickered over to Spike, then skipped back, and he straightened again, went back to that ‘at attention’ thing. “Ma’am, I was a biology major. Beg to report, I am fascinated, and would in fact be willing to resign my commission at any moment in order to continue to take firsthand field notes as a civilian, should it permit me to learn more about a world which I find intriguing, and which seems filled with an entirely other order and classification of sentient and sometimes sapient life which has somehow escaped classification by human science previous to now, even should I never get to publish a damn word. Ma’am.”

/Well. What do you know?/ 

“Huh,” Faith put in, sounding more than a little predatory. “Square-jawed, hunky, smart, good muscles, has a little bit of watcher-guy going… and he’s also nice and respectful. I might just have to give this one a ride or two around the block.”

/Oh, jeez./ Exasperated, Buffy rolled her eyes. “Faith, please don’t play with the soldiers, at least till we know for sure they’re gonna cooperate. I learned the hard way last year that it can end badly.”

Graham, though, she noticed, was breaking the whole ‘eyes-forward’ thing to give Faith a surreptitious once-over.

/Oh, double-jeez./ “She’s a Slayer too, Graham, and she tends to break her toys. Be careful what you wish for.”

Graham’s eyes snapped forward again.

“Aw, man, B; why the hell did you have to warn him off? I was just about to take him for a spin!”

“We’ve got bigger fish to fry right now, Faith. Demon hatched from a meteor, remember? Kills people by spitting in their mouths?”

Graham made a strangled sound.

“Yes,” Buffy snapped, answering the question before army-boy could ‘beg leave’ to ask. “We have some kind of weird, extraterrestrial invasion of the demon-kind going on here. I’m not a fan. You wanna help, keep your totally-unprepared jerkwads off of it. You wanna go check it out, follow that glowy line. It heads back toward the meteorite deal. We’re following it the other way, to see where the monster’s headed… hopefully before there’s a bigger body-count.”

Graham’s eyes darted back down the trail into the woods, then returned to settle on the car. “Permission to join your team, Slayer?”

/Oh,  _ hell _ no./ “Are you  _ kidding _ me?”

“Aw, c’mon, B. The cute army-man wants to be helpful!” Sidling close, Faith ran a hand up one tautly-tucked arm. “Nice. Hey, seriously. I really wanna keep him. Let’s bring him along and see how he does on a hunt.” She shot Graham a sultry look that promised all sorts of smoldering delights, for god’s sake. “I really don’t always break my toys,” she confided in low, inviting tones. “Buffy’s a little biased…”

“Ah… Ma’am, I’m flattered, but…”

“Faith, this is not playtime. We have a demon to put down.”

“Oh, bloody hell, Buffy, let the chit have her natural prey. Only, let’s get on, yeah? Before the sodding trail runs cold?”

Buffy swung on her vampire, floored. “You want to let this…  _ guy _ in your  _ car?” _ she demanded. 

If he had told her he wanted to give up blood and take up street theater, she could not possibly have been more stunned. /Are you serious, with this?/ She got that Spike had a background in scholarly crap, but that little speech was no reason to trust a guy whose scholarly background with demons had led him to join a fascist outfit and study them like mice in a cage! /To study _you!_ /

“Pet, I think the chit’ll keep him in hand. So to speak.”

“Oh, I’ll keep him in hand.” Faith edged, if possible, even closer to Graham and threaded her arm through his to tug him up against her side.

Graham made a faint gargling noise.

/Oh, for fucksake./ “Fine. If he tries to shoot my vampire with anything pointy and wooden, you’re responsible for breaking his neck.”

“Oh,” Faith answered, lifting her free hand briefly from the dark-clad arm under hers, “can do, B.” She glanced up at Graham, resettled her palm on his chest. “Come on in, hottie. The backseat in this land yacht is nice and roomy. We can get to know each other.”

Graham looked a little poleaxed as he was dragged toward the vehicle.

Spike snorted as he headed around to the driver’s side door. “Poor sod’s not gonna know what bloody well hit him.”

“I’ll be gentle,” Faith informed them as she gave Graham a shove and ducked in after him. She grinned broadly in the dark, predatory. “Ish.”

“I…”

Buffy sighed as she settled into her seat. “You’re coming on too strong, Faith. He knows we’re part-demon. He’s about to dive out the other side of the car.”

Faith pouted as she pulled her door shut. “I’m coming on too strong?” She turned to survey her frozen prey, who had the look of a rabbit caught in headlights. “Am I coming on too strong? I can give you a chance to feel all manly and chase me a little, if that’s what you need. I mean, it’s boring as hell, but I get guys need that shit.”

Spike scoffed as he turned over the engine and pulled out onto the road. “Don’t forget; when you land the poor bloke, don’t mangle his cock, either.”

Graham made a sound kind of like ‘eep!’. 

“It’s not the first damn time I’ve fucked a human, thanks, Blondie. In fact, since I’m not B and I don’t make a habit of fucking vamps, I’ve  _ mostly _ fucked humans.”

“Mostly?” Buffy inquired, interested.

“Well, there was this hot-as-hell half-Ferava guy this one time. I lost a hand to him in seven-card stud down in LA. It was a little anxious-making. Claws out to here, but the dude fucked like a goddamn oil drill…”

Graham straightened then, a curious shadow in the back seat, outlined in staccato light as they passed under the freeway and re-entered civilization. “I don’t know that classification. Ferava…”

“About seven feet tall. Marsupial, with double-jointed limbs. Seven-clawed fingers and toes. Yellow eyes, kind of a boom-y voice. Echo-y. What’s the word…”

“Sonorous,” Spike put in from the front seat. He sounded amused.

“Makes you vibrate in all the right places. Mmm. Kind of neat skin, too,” Faith finished, sounding oddly reminiscent. “Not slick so much as… really, really smooth. The kinda skin you want sliding all over your body…”

“Oh, wow…” Buffy muttered, wishing she could close her ears.

“Oh, like you can talk, B. You’ve made a damn career out of fucking vamps.”

“ _ Two!” _ Buffy countered, stung. “I’ve… had…  _ two _ vampires!”

“Counts as a career when you’re s’posed to slay ‘em.”

Spike was chuckling helplessly by now as he followed the glowing line down the middle of the street

“Is, uh, this a longstanding… professional debate?” Graham queried, tentative.

“Faith’s just jealous,” Buffy posited, feeling smug. “A  _ Ferava? Really?” _

“Half-Ferava. And don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

“How do you even  _ get _ a half…”

Spike swung them sharply around a corner; an abrupt right-hand turn, muttering something about fading lights and irritating spellwork. Buffy interrupted her own question (to which she probably didn’t really want an answer anyway), to query worriedly, “It’s fading?”

“Not as bright as it was.” He shot her a warning look. “Got to put the hammer down, pet.”

The car lurched into overdrive as he stomped down the gas pedal. Buffy fell back against her seat like they’d taken off in a jet.

“Nice car,” Graham tried, a little hesitant. “Seems like… you keep her in good shape. Tough to do with a classic. She’s real responsive.”

Spike reached out, caressed the dash lightly. “She’s been good to me.” Then, of course, the crooning picked up. “Haven’t you then. There’s a love.”

“He sweet-talks this damn thing more than he does me,” Buffy informed them all, without rancor.

“Now, you know that’s not true, Buffy.”

“Says the guy who calls me a ‘barmy bitch’ on the regular.”

“If the shoe bloody fits…”

Faith snorted in amusement.

“Yeah, yeah. Dope.”

“Aren’t they disgusting?” her fellow Slayer bitched from behind them. “Did you know they’re getting freaking married? It’s the actual worst. I mean, look at that guy. You’d think he, at least, would be the type to have a brain in his head…”

“Thanks,” Buffy interrupted dryly.

“…Instead of tying himself forever to a crazy bitch like Buffy…”

“You’re an alright bird, but you say another unkind word about my queen, and I’ll rip off your sodding head and drink from your brain stem, you.” Turning the wheel hard over, Spike guided them around another sharp turn, to the left this time.

“H.S… Ah, I mean… Demons can, uh, get married? I mean, considering the lack of, ah, official paperwork, and, ah, citizenship documentation…”

“We’ve our ways,” Spike muttered, and, impatient, worked his shoulder at speed to crank down his window. “Losing the sodding thing, Slayer. You see it out your side?”

Buffy set to work cranking down her window. Did some squinting till she caught the faint shimmers, barely noticeable anymore, off to one side. “Yeah. Over there on the sidewalk, heading to the left…”

“There’re also demon lawyers,” Faith informed Graham lazily. “LA’s full of ‘em. Bunch of pricks, but they’ll do anything for the right price.”

“Wow.” The soldier sat back in his seat, clearly stunned.

“Me,” Faith went on, unperturbed, “I like to stay free.” Her voice slid back to sultry. “Keep my options open.” 

“And in the whole ‘professional debate’ deal, we have the winner of the ‘who’s sluttier than who’ category.

Faith wasn’t even rattled. “As opposed to the who’s kinkier than who debate, which, these days you might give me a run for my money, huh, B?”

“What do you think, pet?” Spike inquired, making another wide turn. “Likely depends on how much we spend down at Kr’vd’s. Granted we get out of this business with the bleedin’ Council intact, I might feel inclined to just about soddin’ anything by that point.”

Buffy felt her face go up in flames. “Shut  _ up!” _ she hissed at him, unsure if she was horrified or a little bit turned on to feel so… exposed in front of a relative stranger.

Faith, though, had gone down a whole other tack. “This place on the demon side of town? As in, don’t really care about how old you are? Because I could get down with that.”

Spike leaned forward abruptly to peer through the driving slit of the car, narrowed his eyes… then jerked the car to an extremely sudden halt. “You could shop there to your bloody heart’s content, Faith,” he told her, and cranked his door open to step out.

“What?” Buffy demanded, following suit.

Spike jerked his chin, by way of pointing. “Thing went in there, love.”

Buffy followed his gaze. And realized she was looking at the hospital.

***

They tracked the thing up to the fifth floor, courtesy of Spike’s enhanced sniffer. At which point the trail disappeared behind a pair of those doors you needed a hospital ID card to pass through, or to be buzzed into. 

The sign over the ward proclaimed the wing to belong to ‘Psychiatric, Mental Health, Neurology’. 

Buffy was pretty familiar with the floor. For the first time in a very long time, she kinda wished the omnipresent Ben would show his irritatingly friendly face so she could parlay his obsessive attempts to ingratiate himself into a nice tour of the floor or something. 

No Ben appeared like a jackrabbit to make himself useful, though. Not this time.

It was freaking ironic.

Buffy was all set to try some kind of story about a relative—would they buy her having yet another family friend having brain issues?—when Graham, of all people, marched right up to the desk, cutting to the chase while they were all still just standing around trying to come up with illicit ways to break into the ward. “Ma’am,” he began, flashing some kind of badge or military ID or something at the nurse’s station, “we’ve received a report from these people here,” and he waved a hand behind him in the rest of the party’s startled direction, “that one of our missing soldiers might be in this hospital. He would be in the psych ward. He’s in his late twenties, dark hair, exhibiting signs of psychosis, paranoia, experiencing some pretty severe PTSD. Combat stress, you know, but he wouldn’t remember himself enough to identify name or rank to you…”

Buffy blinked, realizing belatedly that this description was just vague enough to sound like anybody, really. 

/Damn, this might work./ And people tended to trust military guys. Honorable and all that crap. 

“We do have one or two patients back there who match that description…” After a brief moment’s hesitation, the nurse nodded and punched a button. The doors swung wide. “I’ll call an orderly to meet you at the ward. Please wait for an escort before going in. The patients tend to become flustered easily.”

Graham put on an expression that was so full of down-home, apple-pie sweetness that Buffy herself almost fell for it at a distance of thirty feet. “Ma’am, you are a saint. Thank you.” Heck, even a little twang of some sort or another had slid into his voice, and where was the guy from, Texas or something?

And then he had turned and was gesturing to them as if he was in charge. “C’mon, friends. I’ll need you with me to help ensure I’ve identified the correct individual. I haven’t met Corporal Starkweather in person, myself.”

Buffy exchanged glances with her party, then did a short skip-jog to catch up before the doors closed behind the soldier. “Corporal Starkweather?” she demanded as she drew even with Graham.

“Hell, I dunno; I’m wingin’ this. Got you in, though, right?” His eyes flickered over to Spike’s. Buffy noted that, in the fluorescents, they were a decent blue themselves, if a bit clearer and with a little less ‘body’ than Spike’s. More glass-like.

Spike snorted in answer, sounding half-amused, half-reluctantly-admiring. “Ironic name, that.”  And he drew in a deep inhalation. “This way.” Taking the lead, he struck out down the corridor, and took the first right.

Faith’s eyes were on Graham. “Damn, nice eyes too. And what’s with the accent?”

“I’m from the backwoods of Florida, Ma’am,” Graham informed her, and gave a tiny tip of his head, as if he were from Mars. “Doesn’t come out much, but get a coupla beers in me and it gets away from me, might start talking about wrestlin’ gators, or…”

“Oh,  _ hell _ no,” Faith started. “You and me can  _ talk _ , boy.”

“Oh God,” Buffy muttered, and took a few longer strides. It was all over. Graham was toast.

“What, Buffy?” Spike asked in distracted tones.

“Nothing. Graham there just signed and sealed himself. The poor guy is the next gator Faith’s gonna wrestle. She’s not gonna take that challenge lying down.”

Shaking his head slightly, Spike muttered something back about incomprehensible Slayer chits… then halted to lift a hand in warning. “Here.” And he nodded at a set of double doors to their right. “In there.”

Sucking in a hard breath, Buffy jerked her chin over at Faith. “Hey. Donna Juan. We’re up.”

“Hold that thought, handsome,” Faith put in smoothly, and trailed a seductive finger under Graham’s chin before disengaging to draw level with Buffy. “Okay. Slice and dice, back to regularly scheduled getting laid? I really dig this one, B.”

“So I’d noticed.” Behind them, Graham was looking something between stupefied and hungry. Which worked, since Faith was very clearly ravenous. Not that Buffy didn’t get it. She had been fairly frustrated herself prior to her current sitch with the getting boned on the daily, but still. Talk about systematically turning a random guy into a quivering, confused piece of man-meat. 

“Alright, so… I’ll take point. You sweep right.” She shot a glance to Spike, who nodded wordlessly and tilted his neck from side to side, limbering up.

Faith lifted a brow, the question implicit. 

/What? Oh./ “Sorry. Spike always covers my left. Forgot we’d need to spell it out to the uninitiated.” It felt weird to even have to say it.

“Will you want… any cleanup?” Graham asked, somewhat hesitant from the back. “I can… call in for a retrieval team.”

Buffy briefly considered it, since it would be nice simply from the ease-of-finish aspect… but no. No sense opening that can of worms again. “No. Thanks, but… No offense, I don’t trust your guys not to get all weird about the subject again and try to… I dunno. Go a step beyond.”

And she waited, eyeing him. Moment of truth. Would he try to convince her, start fast-talking about evidence of extraterrestrials, and the necessity of involving the government, and ‘You can’t hide this kind of thing from the proper authorities’? Or would he put his money where his mouth was, respect  _ her _ as the proper authority, and back down?

“Right,” he answered finally. “We got in over our heads. No sense going back there.”

Huh. Who knew?

He even looked all clear-eyed and genuine about it. So, then… either he was telling the truth, totally deferring, and he wouldn’t call… or he was telling her what she wanted to hear, and he would call the minute her back was turned.

No time like the present to find out.

With a nod to her flankers, Buffy headed in. 

And witnessed a nightmare.

The… thing in there was bent over the second-to-last bed of about twenty, hunched over a whispering body. The person lying there was staring up in evident horror, saying over and over, “No, you can’t, I didn’t pay my taxes yet, you see; I didn’t pay them, so you can’t, because the IRS will come after us both, so you can’t, you see, because I didn’t pay…” 

The thing bending over his mouth looked like a massive, shining, child-sized cockroach, but with a horribly-pale human face attached to the end of its curling carapace. And it was leaning far-over the terrified victim on the gurney, its expression inhuman and filled with oncoming death.

Across the aisle, on the one other bed with a mobile figure, a person sat up, open-mouthed and staring, dumb and chattering. Very occasionally, she whispered, “Mama? Mama…”

Every other bed held an individual made still and silent with the choking ordure Spike had followed in here; a pall so strong now even Buffy smelled it.

“Shit, that’s nasty,” Faith bitched, waving her hand in front of her face. “And that’s an ugly fucking thing. I say we kill it.” Suiting action to words, she broke into a run, diving straight down the silent aisle; rolled, and came up with the lifter bar from under one of the beds, torn loose mid-tuck.

“Shit,” Buffy exclaimed, and followed suit, a beat behind. It was better than no weapon at all.

“Bloody mad bints,” she heard Spike complain, heard him take up the rear to circle as widely as he could to the left, probably casting about him with his eyes as he did so for something to use as a weapon in turn.

Armed with her own bar, torn from the bed of one of the unfortunates, Buffy flanked Faith opposite her sister-Slayer across the gurney holding the still-living patient, who was now gibbering in panic and staring from one to the other of them. “He doesn’t work for H&R Block!” he shrieked, sounding like a fire engine. “He doesn’t work for Jackson Hewitt! He’s an imposter! I can’t do my taxes with this kind of noise!”

“It’s okay, guy,” Faith informed him, and swung like a golfer driving a ball down the green. “We’ll send him packing for you, and you can find another CPA.”

The alien-demon-whatever hissed… and took flight to bounce off the wall. When it landed, it promptly skittered… or maybe slithered? under the bed belonging to the only other remaining person in the room with a pulse who wasn’t part of the rescue party. 

“Well, hell,” Faith put in. “That shell thing’s hardy.”

Spike, who was closest, ducked to lift the bed’s dangling sheet a little. “Things with a carapace tend to be. Exoskeletons are handy that way… oh, hush. I’ll not hurt you. Bloody Christ, what a lot of noise.” For the patient on the bed above him had set up a shrieking like one of Giles’ tea-kettles upon his approach and was now kind of doing a dog-whistle thing. “Right then, everything’s like to be fine, we’ll see to it. Just hush, then…”

While inwardly marveling at her guy’s relatively sweet, calming tones—that racket must be seriously painful to a vampire’s hearing. It sure didn’t feel good to her own—Buffy listened warily for a moment for skittering, watched for any moving shadows. Risked a brief glance at the mouth of the guy they’d just saved. He seemed un-spat-upon, except for a blot of the stuff on one corner of his mouth. “Just have to make it to April,” he muttered, subsiding for the moment from the shriekfest. “Got to pay my taxes on time. If I don’t, she’ll be mad. Got to have the money by May. Got things to build. Everything ends in May. Need to make the investment.”

Something shivered down Buffy’s spine. “Everything ends in May,” she repeated, quietly.

Spike lifted his eyes away from his perusal of the floor between the row of beds on his side of the room. “Bloody hell; you think…” 

Buffy’s eyes met his. “Maybe.”

“Fuck.”

“What?” Faith demanded, gripping her makeshift nine-iron.

“Maybe these people all got killed by this thing because they see the truth. Crazy people do, a lot of the time, huh, Spike.”

Spike made a pained sort of exhale. “Bleedin’ right they do. Can you parse it out of the gibberish, that is.” His eyes trailed over the rows of bodies. “Christ, what a mess.” And then his gaze sought Buffy’s again. “Reckon somebody wanted to keep somethin’ real soddin’ quiet, love. Think maybe it was this May deadline?”

Buffy sighed, half in exasperation and half in disbelief. “Since when is it  _ not _ May?”

“Yeah, well. Wasn’t last year.”

“Because we sent Graham’s idiots packing…”

“Good bloody riddance…”

“Okay, this sounds like I need to hear a story,” Faith put in. “What did Hunky McStud out there have to do with last year’s…”

She cut off, falling backward and dropping her rod when the thing from the meteor flew at her to leap into her face, and landed full on her chest.

Buffy was there in an instant, her own golfing moves at the ready. Ted would have been proud—not that she ever wanted to make that asshole proud of her—swinging with pinpoint accuracy to send the extraterrestrial monster soaring high off of her sister-Slayer and directly into Spike’s orbit. 

She also threw her rod. 

Spike caught it with a flash just as the thing closed with him. He had only the time to hold it out before him. Hence, he essentially impaled the creature by accident. Buffy, who had snatched up Faith’s dropped implement the instant she’d tossed her own away, was there while it was still hissing and screeching in her guy’s face, to whack the head half off of its trapped form.

End of alien invasion.

“Faugh!” Spike groaned, and thrust the weighted rod away from him, dropping it over the edge of the nearest bed, to fall over the far side. “Christ, that thing smells.”

“It’s no Gio,” Buffy agreed, dragging him close, and gave him a sniff. He sported a few drops of the thing’s… blood? Ichor? Whatever, on his shirt, a little of it on the duster, but they’d both live. “But underneath it is still _eau de_ fighty vampire, which is the best cologne this side of _eau de_ just been in my bed vampire, so I’ll take it…”

Spike eyed her for a second as if she’d lost her damn mind, then shook his head, looking faintly amused around the edges of his still completely disgusted expression. “Buffy, know how very bloody much I sodding adore you, that you can successfully flirt with me when all I can smell in this bleedin’ place is that fucking thing. Christ; let’s get the hell out of here.”   
  
“Impatient, much?” she asked him, but folded her fingers in his lapels and turned to lead him out. “We’ll make that guy Graham do cleanup, since he wants to be so useful. He can heft the thing out of here.” Glancing over her shoulder, she lifted her brow. “You okay, Faith?”

Back on her feet, Faith rolled her eyes. “Nice shot, B.” Her gaze skipped to Spike. “And nice catch, Blondie.”

Spike grunted. “Was an accident. Meant to knock the damn thing’s head off.”

Faith scoffed and dusted off her jean jacket. “Don’t be honest. It looks better when you’re all heroic.”

“She’s wrong. I like honest. And I like even more how you chop and change.” 

Spike turned his head, frowned as they made to depart. “Need to get someone in here, pet. These two need meds, someone to talk to. Like to go right off the deep end, after all this. Might bloody well hurt themselves. ‘M amazed no one’s come yet, all this ruckus. Tossers.”

Buffy blinked at him, nonplussed. Why was he so concerned about a couple of humans he’d never met? Normally he couldn’t care less. These were just a couple random, crazy…

/Oh./

Spike had a soft spot for crazy. Easy to understand why, too, considering he’d spent a hundred and twenty years taking care of it, catering to it, cosseting it, ensuring its survival against all odds. 

Dropping his lapels, she caught his hand in hers. “We’ll make sure someone comes for them.”

“Yeah.”

Graham was standing outside the door when they got out, at attention, as if he was on guard or something, ready to repel anyone who came by. “Did you get it?”

“Yeah, hot stuff, we got it. You wanna go grab it for us? We need to smuggle it out before anyone gets here.”

Graham looked taken aback. Faith waved a lazy hand. “Buffy wants to play Madonna of the unwell or whatever and run and get an orderly for the survivors, so I guess we’ll be hanging around for a few.”

Graham paused for only a moment, then, with a shrug, turned for the door, pushed it warily open, and headed in, looking first to the left and then to the right to case the space. 

Give credit where it was due, he was good at following orders.

“I’m liking this boy,” Faith murmured appreciatively, eyeing his ass as he vanished into the room and the doors flapped shut behind him.

Shaking her head, Buffy jerked her chin at Spike. “Back in a few.”

“Right.”

She was, with a confused-looking somebody with a name-tag and scrubs who, though she seemed incapable of absorbing anything of an explanation involving suffocation of multiple patients, took one look at the room full of bodies—and two highly-agitated survivors—turned a sort of khaki color, stared at them all, and bolted. Buffy nodded at her coterie and edged away. The two living patients would be taken care of. “Where’s Graham?”

“Around the corner with the bug,” Faith answered easily. “Where’re we gonna put it?”

“I dunno. Bury it somewhere. Whatevs.”

“Cool. You guys want a burger? I’m  _ starving _ .”

Buffy lifted a brow at Spike, who shrugged amiably enough. “Rather have an onion blossom.”

/Of course you would./ They caught up with their black-clad ex-ninja-commando at the next bend, flinching at the smell of his over-the-shoulder burden. “Hey, Graham. Burger run after this. Spike wants onion blossoms, so we’re stopping at the Shack, down there by the waterfront…”

“Wait, hold up. Why the Shack?” Faith demanded. “Their burgers are…”

“You’ll survive,” Buffy interrupted. “Tell ‘em not to give you the sauce.”

“Aw, hell, B; they always put it on anyway, and you know I hate that rancho shit.”

“Tell ‘em you’re an East Coast girl. Show ‘em your boobs. Maybe they won’t this time.”

“This sounds like an ongoing argument,” Spike put in, amused.

“This is your fault, you know,” Faith griped at him. “Why do you have to have that stupid onion thing?”

Spike grunted at her punch to his short-ribs. “Only other place I can get it in town is the soddin’ Bronze, and if I know Slayers, nothing on their menu’ll suffice for a post-Slay appetite.”

Faith sighed heavily. “Shit; you’ve got that right.” She turned to walk backward a little ahead of them, eyeing Graham frankly up and down. “Especially since, after burying that piece of shit, I have plans for brawny, here. You got a place of your own, Florida? Somewhere more private than a cot in a basement?”

Buffy rolled her eyes again and tucked her arm into Spike’s.

Graham shifted his burden on his shoulder, snugged the loose head a little more firmly under his arm, and answered warily. “I have a place. I share it with For… With a guy who’s a little… prejudiced…”

Faith shrugged. “So, don’t tell him what I am. I’ll give you the lay of a lifetime. I’ll even go easy on you the first time around, let you get the lay of the land.” She winked at him. “You can’t ask for a better deal than that. Direct, in-person forensic field research and all that crap. Whaddya say, cowboy?”

Graham was clearly wavering. Faith’s relentless, no-holds-barred, unflinching approach apparently had its charms. “I… I’m not in a place where I can… commit to anyth…”

Faith burst out laughing. “Oh, jeez, get a load of this guy. Listen. I’m not asking for your class ring, dude, I’m asking for a roll in the hay. No harm, no foul. I’m a realist.”

Graham nodded, straightened a little. “What if… I like you, after?” he asked, reasonably.   
  
Faith tilted her head, pursed her lips. “Then maybe I give you another roll. If  _ I _ decide I like  _ you _ , huh? We’ll see. If not…” She spread her fingers.  _ “C’est la vie,  _ buddy. In the immortal words of Janet Jackson, that’s just the way it goes.”

They found the back stair, and were halfway down to the fourth floor before Graham spoke again. “Sometimes it goes another way.”

Predictably, Faith didn’t answer that sally.

Buffy kind of thought Faith was pretending she didn’t hear it.

***

They stopped somewhere in the vicinity of the tracks, out between Twin Pines Cemetery, Greenwalt, and the railway grade, and Graham tugged the alien corpse out of the trunk while Spike held the door open and bitched about how he would probably never get the stink out of the liner. Then the soldier used Spike’s tiny camp shovel—Spike was seriously prepared for anything, though Buffy honestly didn’t want to know why he had a shovel in the trunk—to dig the thing’s grave, and tipped it and the head unceremoniously in.

Possibly he’d send a team along later to come extract it out of the dirt. Who knew. Thus far, though, he seemed dependable enough, and willing. Buffy had to give credit where it was due. He wasn’t even complaining about being given all their grunt work while Spike leaned back smoking with Faith, the latter watching in clear enjoyment and making remarks about his soldierly arms, and Buffy fielded a call from Jonathan. 

“Great. Great, that makes… a lot of sense, and probably we coulda used that info an hour or so ago. No, no it’s not your fault. It’s all good, Jonathan, you did fine. Thanks.”

“What, Slayer?” Spike demanded, concerned by her probably bitchy vibe as she closed the call,

“Oh, y’know. The ancient tales from Babylon or wherever. Assyria?” He nodded to show he followed. “There was a thing they called a ‘queller’? I guess because it was ‘called down from the skies, from the lands of the Gods’, to, uh, ‘stop the mouths of those who are… touched?’ And, who…” Buffy struggled to remember it all, to play it back in Jonathan’s voice, in her mind. “Um, ‘see beyond the veil, that that to which they, uh, bear witness may…’” She bit her lip. “I think, ‘walk unseen’. Because ‘their voices are quelled’.”

“Well, fuck.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

Faith, turning aside from her satisfied perusal of her personal slave-in-training, nodded, and cast down her cigarette butt. “That’s a load of bullshit Watcher-talk for ‘somebody summoned that fucker’, B.”

Buffy sighed heavily and nodded over crossed arms. “Unfortunately, our candidates right now are a little hooded guy with leprosy and a crazy blonde ho who could wipe the floor with all three if us without breaking a sweat.”

“You know that just makes me want to take her on.”

“Don’t be too eager,” Spike cautioned. “She’s a real bitch.” He snorted. “And she’s got a crooked arse. Can’t anticipate her kicks for shite.”

Faith snorted a surprised laugh. “Appreciate the assessment. Bet the three of us could take her together, though.”

Buffy frowned, watching dirt fly in over the alien’s dull carapace. It rattled as it fell. 

“We should all start sparring, y’know? Get into the groove. Feel out each other’s moves, so we know how to work with each other. Then, next time the bitch jumps us, we’ll be ready. No missed steps, huh?”

Spike nodded, eyes finding Buffy’s. “Chit’s got a point, love.”

She did. Tonight’s fight was mostly luck. They needed to find a better rhythm if they were to have any chance against Glory. 

Which meant Buffy needed to get over her issues with the idea of Faith sparring with her guy. /It’s not like it’s even a thing, anyway. Spike talks a big game about how he gets Anya and Xander’s deal, or how he thinks Wil and Tara and Oz should’ve done a threesome, but I know he only wants me, so it’s no big if Faith flirts, right?/

/And gets him turned on, because she’s a Slayer, and puts her hands all over him, and…/

And Buffy knew she needed to get past this before they faced down Glory, or else she’d be too busy fighting Faith in her own mind to be able to work with her, and the world could end up going down in an apocalypse because she was too busy worrying about crap that had no basis in reality.

/Wouldn’t that be just the world’s dumbest reason to lose a fight with a big bad?/

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
So, yeah. Graham happened. And refused to ever leave again, because randomly his chemistry with Faith was off the charts (I don't know. I really, really had no idea. I swear). And then he became freaking USEFUL.   
  
What the hell?!  
Slot him under 'Top Ten things I didn't expect to happen in this story'.  



	28. Chapter 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... quite a few things happen in this chapter, between new Sunnydale politics, Buffy and Faith ready to clear the air about past Fuffy stuff... and the uptick in events leading to my version of Checkpoint. Hope ya like! 
> 
> Extra credit if you recognize the reference in Spike’s little speech below. It’s supposed to show that this particular fic leans more toward one specific Shakespeare couple rather than another, despite the title.

They dropped Faith off with Graham and two burgers—neither of them rancho-style—over in Goleta off Madison; near Fort Wilkins, and incidentally, if Graham knew it, very damn close to a whole settlement of half-demon families.

“Have fun,” Buffy called absently out of her lowered window as they turned slowly to pivot out of the gravel driveway.

“Don’t cripple the lad,” Spike called on her heels, less helpfully.

“Uh, how’m I gonna get my car tomorr…” Graham started. 

“We’ll worry about that tomorrow. Where’s your bed, cowboy? Or are you more of a bang in the hallway kinda guy?”

“Uhh…”

They peeled out, back onto the little side-road, leaving the logistics to Faith and her conquest. “I need a soddin' shower,” Spike muttered as he turned left to stay on Madison, then swung them around in the wide arc around the vast, triangular palm plantation that joined that street and Tauamount. “Think we’ll wake Mum?”

“It’s not like she’s not used to us coming in late to hose off,” Buffy answered, and cracked a yawn. “Besides; if we can keep it quiet, we have a debate to get into, after.”

Spike froze a little as he slowed for a light. “Oh, bloody hell, what did I do now?”

“We can talk about it after we get cleaned up.”

“That sounds real bleedin’ ominous, love,” he pointed out, eyes on the road, then cruised back up to speed as the light made its swift, after-hours change.

A few minutes later they were at the house, and he was parked in the spot Mom now tended to leave for him closer to the house, having given up pride of place to him in deference to his ‘sun allergy’. 

They showered in uncharacteristic silence, swift and utilitarian, though with their usual mutual helpfulness, then stepped out to dry and brush their teeth, et cetera. Spike fanged out briefly to complete his dental care. Buffy moisturized as was her wont, Spike lotioning her back without being asked. She did the same for him, all without words, and they slipped across to the bedroom silent as mice. 

Once the door was shut, though, and she was at the dresser with her back to him, she sighed and shoved the drawer closed with her elbow, then shook her head and just stood there for a sec holding her selected pair of panties. “The thing is, you can’t just threaten people for me.”

Whatever he’d been expecting, standing all stiff and worried for the entire length of their mutual shower experience, it had not been that. “Bloody… You’re my  _ mate _ ,” he hissed back, “and he  _ hurt _ you.” He made no pretense of not knowing what she was talking about. “And you know I  _ feel _ it when you hurt. I have to be able to do  _ something.” _

With a sigh, she tugged out a camisole and turned to him, holding both articles of clothing in her hand. “Spike. I have to be able to stand on my own.” 

His expression remained mulish. Dammit. This was going to be one of those  _ long _ discussions.

Swinging away again, she stripped off her towel and tossed it over the chair, then dressed swiftly, and truth be told, a little angrily now. “Look. We’ve been  _ through _ it, him and me. I  _ told _ you that. It’s not on you to fix it for me, okay?” She had to struggle to tamp down the surge of irritation that rose, because, yes, she got it. When anyone hurt him, she wanted to tear them apart, too. /I get it, Spike. I  _ do _ . But…/ “We all have our own battles, right?”

He flung away his own towel, so that it settled haphazardly over the corner of the bed, which normally really pissed her off. It would make the comforter damp. Right now, though, she really just had bigger fish to fry; and seeing the way he was dragging his hand through his damp curls like he wanted to tear his hair out was a sign that he was fighting not to scream at her or something. 

She didn’t need the flare of outrage from the link between them to tell her that. “Our own battles,” he finally answered, low and menacing in the gloom. “Our own bloody battles. Bein’ drugged so you’re weak as a kitten and tossed into a locked house with a sexual deviant who had designs not just on you, but also on Joyce, so you had to protect your mum as well as yourself…”

Buffy froze. “How’d you know that…”

He swung away, naked and radiating a rage so vast that she could taste it on the back of her tongue. “I was in London when he tore through the whole bloody city, ‘fore the wankers caught him, innit? Lot of demons had a laugh over it. But bein’ the deviant vamp _I_ am, with a soft spot for mums, for some reason I couldn’t see the hilarity.”

“Oh.” /Shit./

“Yeah.” It came out tight, between clenched teeth. 

So, then, he would have some idea of what she’d gone through, in that boarded up house. What Mom had gone through. In fact, he was probably imagining much worse than what had actually happened, and she should tell him know right now that… “He didn’t… I didn’t let him…” She swallowed, huffed out a breath to stabilize her voice. “I stopped him before he did anything. He just… took pictures. And then… He wanted his pills. They had him hooked on some kind of downer. So I fed him holy water with the pill, and…”

Spike spun back around to stare at her in amazement, then collapsed abruptly to the bed like his strings had been cut, and buried his face in his hands. “Oh Christ, oh Christ pet, oh bloody hell.” And relief blew through their bonding, so powerful that it damn near knocked her off her feet. “ Oh, Buffy, my love, you’re the sodding One. How the bloody hell they could even think you wouldn’t…” Then his eyes were blazing up into hers, and his shoulders were shaking. “Christ, sweetheart, you’re amazing.” 

God, the way he was  _ looking _ at her. 

He bit his lip then, fearful. “And… Mum was… alright?”

/Oh… He must think…/ “Yeah,” she hastened to assure him. “I mean, she was terrified, of course, but he… He didn’t have time to… To do… anything. And he’d killed all the Watchers who… I mean, except for the boss guy. Quentin, uh… Travers.”

His eyes went back to blazing. “Don’t s’pose I get to drain  _ him?” _

Honestly? Buffy didn’t quite trust herself to speak in case she said yes instead of no, so she remained silent. 

Spike, of course, assumed her answer, for he didn’t wait to hear her negative. He was already on his feet again and pacing. “Still, love. Rupert started it, yeah? You must’ve felt so damned  _ alone _ , so  _ bleedin’ _ betrayed…”

“I did,” she whispered. “I felt like I didn’t even know who he  _ was _ anymore. But we kind of… bonded again over the reason  _ why _ he went through with it. He was so scared that they’d take his green card. Take him away from me, send someone else, if he didn’t go along with it. He thought if he did, and then helped me survive, then maybe he could  _ keep _ helping me. But then he confessed, and tried to stop it; so they fired him…”

Spike made a sound that was kind of a cross between a snarl and a grunt, like he’d been punched in the short ribs, and oh. He didn’t know Giles wasn’t getting paid anymore?

“Yeah. Anyway, so then we kinda bonded over that, and fighting off the new guy, this idiot named Wesley…”

Spike’s head popped up, his eyes taking on a new, vindictive light. “The bloke Faith says is in LA now?” He was already halfway back to his feet, probably envisioning a quick trip to the city to drain somebody who might actually be fair game in her eyes.

/Well, crap./ “Yeah,” she qualified carefully. “I guess after the Council fired him, too, he went solo down there.”

Spike relaxed slightly. Then, out of nowhere he choked out a harsh half-laugh and threw himself back down on the edge of the bed, to stare ruefully up at her out of the corners of his eyes. “Sounds like workin’ with you chits ends up with a lot of Watchers gettin’ themselves sacked.” 

/You know… It kinda does./ Buffy shrugged and moved close to sit gingerly next to him. “Yeah, I guess they, uh, get too close to us, or something, and end up rebelling against orders, and then they’re ‘of no use to the cause’ or some crap like that.”

“Well,” Spike murmured, and lifted a hand to stroke her drying hair away from her face, “that’s bound to happen, incredible chits like you lot, goin’ round bein’ soddin’ amazing and showin’ ‘em what it’s all about.”

Buffy looked down briefly into her hands, then met his eyes firmly. “Can you deal with this? Because I need to know.”

He worried at his lip again, then tilted his head slightly to eye her from under his lashes, with an unusual look in his blue gaze; one she couldn't quite place. His hand slipped around to cup her cheek, his thumb stroking the corner of her mouth in a way that was incredibly gentle; wildly at odds with his previous tones. “Think it in your soul that this Watcher hath not wronged you?” he asked then, softly.

/Uuuuuhhhh…./ “Wait, what?”

He didn't falter in his caress, his eyes strangely intent on hers. “Tell me now, love, that you truly believe that Rupert hasn’t wronged you, and I’ll let it go.”

/Oh, crap./ He had, and they both knew it. But the thing was, it was more complicated than that. “He has, but… he’s made… what’s the word? Reparation? And he’s still trying? And… I need to… to keep giving the people around me that opportunity, Spike, because they gave it to me.”

Spike froze mid-caress. “You’re sayin’… this is his hyena bit, innit?”

/Oh jeez./ Though… “I guess, yeah.”

Spike sighed heavily and returned his gaze to his free palm. Every ounce of him radiated reluctance, frustration, when he finally spoke up again. “And you feel you have to allow every one of those gits one free in-slip because you supposedly wronged them by undoin’ the bloody curse with the Great Forehead?” It was obvious from the harsh note kept in careful check in the back of his voice that he was fighting not to lash out over that whole thing, again, like he'd done the last time they'd touched the edges of this conversation; a year ago, in a motel room. Which... how weird was it that this was kind of really close to the anniversary of that period, right now?   
  
Anyway, she in no way needed their link to know he found it beyond exasperating that she still held herself even remotely accountable for the whole Angelus fiasco, so she  made a face and looked away. “I’m kind of over that part," she allowed. "More… that I couldn’t dust him. I should’ve just… killed him and got it over with. But all I could see was my lover’s face and… I just couldn’t." She managed a tiny, ashamed shrug. "So he terrorized everyone, and killed Jenny Calendar and left her in Giles’ bed, and…” She lifted her eyes to Spike’s. “He even terrorized you, didn’t he, while you were in that wheelchair…”

His eyes snapped back to hers, and his hand dropped to her neck. He gave her a fierce little shake. “Oh, bloody hell. Quit it, Buffy. You’re bein’ daft. You know that tosser’s terrorized me since I was turned. Has not a soddin’ thing one to do with you." And his hand returned to its previous position, went back to stroking her cheek. "I’m not your responsibility…”

She shot him a pointed look. He had the grace to look slightly embarrassed. “I’m just saying,” she drove it home. “I had a job to do and I didn’t do it. They gave me a pass, because I was a stupid kid in love, so I have to give all of them a pass. One pass.”

With a heavy sigh, he dropped his face into his free hand, though he kept his other on her cheek. After a long moment, though, he lifted it away to watch her again, and turned his fingers to run a caress, just lightly with the backs of his knuckles, along her cheekbone. “‘Enough,’” he whispered then. “‘I am engaged.’”

Okay, now she was really lost. “Eng… I mean, of course you are! You were the one who gave me a ring.” 

That wide, delighted smile of his that he saved up for special occasions dawned over his whole face, made his eyes twinkle. His thumb slipped over her lips, dropped to her chin, and he shook his head slightly, amused about something. “Not that type of engaged, pet. Committed. To a course of action,” he elaborated quietly.

“What is even happening in this conversation right now?”

His hand dropped away to his thigh, and he leaned away a little, amusement fled. In its place, solemn sobriety to darken his eyes. “Once upon a time, Buffy, it was a man had to speak up; to fight for a woman’s honor, in a time when it was in question whether she even had a soul.” He gave a tiny shrug to show what he thought of that, while she was still reeling from the very concept. People had once wondered if women had souls? “Now he must do the opposite,” her vampire went on softly, “and by it prove that, whether he has one or no… he is still hers first, and love the higher calling, even, than honor.” He watched her with that strange look on his face, as if realizing something belated, something important. “The battle the same, Buffy, even if the reason given, opposite. So, enough.” And his hand rose again, this time to catch hers, lift it. And he kissed her just behind the ring he’d given her. “I am engaged.”

She was incredibly touched, even though she had no idea, still, what the hell had just happened. “I’m gonna take that to mean you’re on my side now.”

“Right enough.”

“Okay. I’m gonna kiss you now.”

“It’d be fitting if you did that, pet.”

“Oh. Good.” Still feeling a little bit like she’d walked into the middle of some sort of movie where she didn’t know the lines, Buffy leaned forward to brush his lips with hers. He caught the back of her head with his hand, though he didn’t do more than make the kiss an almost chaste meeting, gentle and slow and…quiet. And then he pulled away, smiled slightly, pressed his forehead to hers. “You look right knackered, my love.”

“I am,” she agreed, and as if on cue, cracked a yawn.

“Go on, then,” he told her, and nodded toward the head of the bed. “I’ll be in in a mo’ to hold you.” And he rose to dig in the drawer she’d given him, to find a pair of sweats; his one concession to house rules when he slept here.

Moments later he had the light off and was stretched out behind her, a familiar cool weight, and she could close her eyes, aware he was watching over her as she ticked slowly down to somnolence in the gloom. 

Just as she was fading out, she thought she heard him say, “Christ, someday you really need to let me rough up at least one person who’s hurt you, Buffy, or I’m gonna burst. Too many shite people breakin’ my goddess’ heart in this bad old world, and it ain’t right…”

/Demon…/ her disjointed thoughts answered, a fading blip, and, /grr…/

And then, nothing.

***

As they stood outside of Willy’s preparatory to making their co-grand entrance the next afternoon, Buffy shot Faith a sly look. “So. How’s Graham?”

Faith tugged away her cigarette and pursed her lips. Shaking her head after a sec, she lifted a brow. “Tell you what, B. He’s  _ earnest _ . And the boy’s got stamina. Give him that.” Tossing down the remains of the butt, she ground it under her high-heeled boot. “I think I’ll keep him for a while.”

Every move of the dance was familiar, after a year of dating Spike. Buffy could wish it wasn’t. Faith was using the ‘coolness factor’ of smoking to cover emotions she didn’t want to be having. 

Buffy would never have remotely recognized that reality a year ago. Not in the slightest. “Thought guys were a love ‘em and leave ‘em deal for you,” she tried, prodding lightly.

“Yeah, well…” Turning away, Faith headed for the bar door, “good in the sack is hard to come by with dudes, and he’s pretty damn decent, so…” She shot a brief, if charged glance over her shoulder at Buffy. “We doin’ this or what, B?”

“Yeah.” It was important that Faith know the altered lay of the land as it pertained to demons and Slayers if she was to function in the new hierarchy of Sunnydale without screwing up everything Buffy and Spike had going here. Also, Buffy needed Faith’s buy-in before the Council showed up, which meant getting her sister-Slayer on her side. Faith’s testimony on how much better the new system actually worked with regards to keeping Slayers alive and reducing risk to the human population might actually tip the scales.

/If they even listen, instead of just coming in guns blazing, of course. And, you know, if Faith’s not just bored by all the diplomacy stuff, because she prefers to come in and kick everyone in the teeth./ 

How had she never noticed before how much Faith was like Spike? 

/Well, to be fair, you didn’t know Spike as well as you do now when you were hanging with Faith, but still. You’ve had time to compare notes since./

“I’m trying to remember if you’ve ever met Willy,” Buffy put in as they moved through the short, dark foyer of the bar.

“Wouldn’t call it ‘met’,” Faith answered. “Been in here, you know. Saw the guy. We came in here and beat up a few dudes for 411 once. Think he hid behind the counter and spent the whole time yelling that he didn’t know anything.”

Buffy smiled a little to herself. “Yeah, that sounds like Willy.”

Things had obviously changed since Faith’s tenure as the Mayor’s enforcer; in more ways than one. Buffy’s entry to the bar was no longer occasion for the place to go dead silent and for every demon within to freeze up, rabbit, or go aggro-beast. Most of them actually just went on drinking and chatting; though not with any show of disrespect. There were a few nods of acknowledgment, and a definite  _ frisson _ that went through the room; a broad sense of  _ awareness _ .

This was augmented, Buffy thought, by the addition of a second Slayer; one, she knew, was known by most of them to have been an ambiguous figure in previous eras. Faith had been, variously, her co-Slayer, then an enforcer of the town’s pro-demon—if ‘no hanky-panky’—head of the executive.

Then she had been put into a coma and exiled by the current Slayer. 

Little bit of a touchy, equivocal political sitch for the locals. They were probably all wondering what note to play things on.

Willy took the first shot, because in his own way he was a brave soul. “Hey, Slayer.” His eyes flickered to Faith from where he stood nervously polishing a glass from behind his bar. “Uh… Slayers. Whaddya have?”

Faith, who looked at ease in the dingy bar, lifted a brow. “Got any Jack, or is it all demon shit in here, like yak piss or whatever?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah… we got Jack. The vamps go for it. Here ya go.” He ducked, set up a shot glass… then hesitated and eyed Buffy askance.

“It’s a little early for me, Willy,” Buffy answered the look, deadpan. “Besides, I know you saw me the night I came in here with Spike. He practically had to carry me out.”

“Okay, sure, kid, but that looked like a private moment. Figured you had a goal in mind. Figured if you’re drinkin’ on the job, it’d be just to be friendly.” Ducking again, he came up with a slightly dusty bottle and poured slowly, paused. Lifted his eyes to Faith. “One or two?”

Faith, leaning back with an elbow on the counter to eye Buffy with interest, made a lazy cutting gesture with her hand. “Just one. Like you said; we’re on duty.” She jerked her chin at Buffy. “Got drunk in here with hot, blond, and wiry, huh, B?”

Buffy did her best to keep her poker face on. “Like Willy said, it was a private moment.”

“Uhuh.” Taking the shot glass from Willy, Faith favored him with a very brief glance. “How much?”

“On the house.”

That earned him a slightly longer, assessing glance, before she lifted her brow and tossed back the shot. It went down smoothly, without a hitch, and she slapped the tiny glass back down and nodded her appreciation. 

Buffy was aware of what Faith was doing. She was letting all the demons in the audience know she was tough, she could hold her liquor, but that she meant business. It was her version of coming in with stake bared, since she couldn’t kill anyone to make the point without unknowingly screwing up Buffy’s current system. 

Faith wasn’t sure where she currently stood in Sunnydale’s demon community. She was aware she might have to rebuild her standing from the ground up. This was her opening salvo.

It appeared to have caught Willy’s attention. “So. To what do I owe the pleasure this fine afternoon, ladies?” he asked, and leaned forward to scrub at the bar with his nasty cloth, probably just to look like he was doing something with his hands.

Buffy shot a glance at Faith, to let her know she could take the lead. Mostly because she was curious how her sister-Slayer would handle opening negotiations.

Faith was a little startled. That was clear by the way she straightened from her lazy lean. She turned to Willy readily enough, though. “Buffy says you keep your ear to the ground in this town.”

“Yeah,” Willy allowed, hesitant but ready to listen.

“We need that right now,” Faith admitted.

“Alright?”

Buffy’s turn. She leaned in. “Those bastards from the Watcher’s Council are on their way back. Any time now, actually. I wanna know if they’re already here. Anyone new been in, asking questions?”

Willy frowned, and his eyes immediately commenced darting around the room, as if searching for enemy informants. “No. I’d’ve known if someone was doing a bunch of unwelcome interrogating, or polling the room for info about the new order in town.” His eyes flicked back to settle nervously on Buffy. “I’d’ve got you a message, Slayer. You know that. I’m not a fan of those assholes either. I sure the hell don’t want ‘em to send in someone new. We got a nice sympatico goin’, here.”

Buffy nodded and cast her eyes around the bar. “Can you spread the word to the guys you think feel the same way, to let you know if they hear rumblings in the underground? I figure there have to be guys in town getting paid off to watch our movements, or the jerks wouldn’t be coming at all. My guess is, whoever it is has kept their mouth shut this long because they like the way things are going too, but if these guys show up right in their faces, they’re gonna fold.”

Willy winced. “Like a house of cards. Yeah. Sure, Slayer. I’ll put the word out. I’ll have it filter through to you and your guy through the game.”

Buffy nodded. Tonight was poker night. They’d hear something by then if there was anything to be heard. “How’s Clem holding up?” Clem had recently lost his spot at the old movie-storage house. It had been cleaned out and bulldozed to make room for yet another crappy little 7-11—like the world needed more of those—with a couple tiny studio apartments on top; a losing attempt, she thought, to lure some human renters back into the town. Buffy was doing her best to whisper in the right real estate ears, find him a nicer place to stay. In the meantime, though, she’d heard he was basically couch-surfing with various other inoffensive demons, which sucked. Accommodations in town were already tight with the non-murdery bunch.

Willy looked a little bleak. “Yeah, you know… not so good. He slept last night over at that one warehouse with those Thurgalds… You know the one?”

Buffy made a tight face and immediately pulled out her phone. “Hang on.” Hit the first number on the speed-dial. This was so not okay.

Spike answered on the third ring, sounding groggy. ‘Bloody hell, luv. I was just having the best dream, involving you, a whole tub of lube, and a pair of shackles…’

Any other time, Buffy would have jumped right on that one to ask him exactly who was doing what in this dream of his, but now wasn’t the time. “Hold that thought. Spike, we barely use the upstairs in the crypt, right?”

His voice sharpened. ‘What the hell’s goin’ on, Slayer?’

“Clem stayed last night in that Thurgald nest down by the wharf.”

‘Oh, Christ.’ She heard the rustle as he sat up. ‘Fuck. Alright. I’ll go make up the soddin’ sofa. But you know that’s gonna cut down on our shag-time.’ A regretful note touched his voice then. ‘And I had somethin’ special planned for our anniversary, too, did these Council bastards give us time to get to it.’

/Awww./ She hadn’t meant to bring it up, considering so much was going down right now that it wouldn’t exactly be his fault if their ‘anniversary’ kind of went by without mention. There was a lot going on, most of it stressful. Not to mention that it was kind of a tossup which day counted as an anniversary.  Definitely a touchy subject, when things between them had started out the way they had. 

Between the two of them, after a little bit of a tentative conversation, they had settled on the day she had first given him her blood, and he'd pledged himself to her.  That was really when they'd started being what they were, anyway. “We’ll find him a safe place,” she assured him softly, “and get to all that whenever we get the chance." That he was worrying about it at all was super-duper touching; especially considering he had shown up so poorly for Valentine’s Day. "But I don’t want him wandering around like that, putting himself in danger because he has nowhere to go.” /We can afford to put our thing off, if we need to. It's a worthy cause./

‘Yeah. Yeah, sure. I’ll go find the poor bloke soon as the sun goes down.’

“No, Faith and I’ll go. I don’t want him down there another second. He might end up the ante in their game or something. Just get the place ready.”

‘Already done, love.’

“Okay. Thank you, Spike.”

A short silence, then, ‘Bloody well love you, Slayer.’

She smiled as the call cut off. 

She didn’t realize Faith was staring at her until she looked up from tucking the flip-phone back into her rear pocket. “What?”

“You’re inviting a demon to stay with you because you’re worried about where he’s living?”

Buffy shrugged, aware Faith was probably boggled by the change in her MO. “It’s only for a sec. Anyway, you haven’t met Clem. He lives on Bugles and  _ Price Is Right _ reruns. He doesn’t even know  _ how _ to hurt anyone. He’s practically squishy.”

Faith just looked floored. “And you let me use the basement in your mom’s house.”

Buffy eyed her for a sec, wary. “I mean, good behavior. You start acting like you wanna go off on anyone, I chain you up.”

Faith’s brow shot up, sultry and amused. “Promise?”

/Oh, wow. Wow, wow, wow./ “Uh, that was supposed to be a threat?”

The moment hung between them, while Buffy fought to locate her stomach, which seemed to have vacated the premises, and Faith watched her with clear amusement. Buffy was beyond grateful when Willy broke the stalemate by clearing his throat very volubly. “So, uh… I’ll spread the word. Let you know if anybody hears anything. And, uh, maybe you could stay away as much as possible, huh, kid? Two of you in town really upsets business.”

“What?” Buffy jerked her gaze away from Faith’s challenging stare to blink at Willy’s nervous countenance. “Oh. Yeah. Sure. We’ll go through Spike. Uh, you should probably pass the word around to anyone who cares about staying alive that those idiots are on their way, too. Best behavior is better for us, but it’s also probably better for them. Keeps us all out of their hands.”

“Yeah. For sure. Take it easy, kid.”

“Yeah. See you later, Willy.” Grabbing Faith’s arm, Buffy dragged her out the door. “What the hell was  _ that?” _ she hissed as they exited out into orange shafts of late afternoon sun.

Faith just smirked into the westering light and gave a little shrug. “Figured since you were so worldly now, you could handle a little flirting, B.” Shaking her head, she started off down the street. “My mistake.”

/Oh. Oh,  _ God _ ./

Spike was right. Spike was actually  _ right _ .

/And now I’ve, like, hurt her feelings or something, haven’t I?/ 

Dammit. “Faith…”

“It’s all good, Buffy.” Faith was going at a good clip now, heading up toward Main. 

Buffy caught her before she could cruise around the bend. “No, wait. Look. Are you…”

“Listen.” Faith whirled, eyes blazing. “I get it.” And there was a world of hurt and pain there; both old and new. “I’m not your type. I always knew that. It’s just tough not to…” She shrugged. “It’s tough not to put it out there when you’re nice to me. You know? But I know better. I’ll keep it to myself.” And, holding herself tightly in check, she whirled again.

/Fuck./ “Faith!”

Faith halted, standing rigid with her back to Buffy.

“You are,” Buffy admitted. “Except…” /Be honest here, or it’ll ruin everything. Be… real./ “I was just too young to even get what you were…” /Shit, shit, shit…/ “And I had on total Angel-blinders. I mean, I didn’t even get it till Spike brought it up, after last time…”

A sharp, pained huff of air; almost a scoff, but too much like an acknowledgment. And then Faith crossed her arms, holding herself tightly. 

But she also looked back a little; just a little, over her shoulder. It was the positioning of a person who didn’t quite dare to meet another person’s eyes.

“I loved you,” Buffy finally finished, and let out a heavy gust of held breath. “I didn’t know…” A little shrug. “I didn’t know anything. But I  _ did _ love you, if that helps any.”

“Yeah?” Faith turned away again, eyes front and shoulders tense. “What about now?”

/Honesty./ “I… I’m not sure if I can trust you. I feel like I can… read you better. Like I get you better. Partly because of him. You’re a lot alike. But, you know…”

A little nod, and a heavy exhale. “You’ve got him.”

She didn’t answer. There was really nothing to be said on that front.

Faith nodded again, slowly now, eyes trained on the pitted, cracked, flaking concrete in front of her. “Thanks… for being straight with me, B. I… appreciate it.”

/This is…/ “Are we…”

Faith gave a little shake of her head. “It’s about what… No. You know what? It’s more than I thought I’d get.” And when she turned her head, Buffy was floored to see wetness—actual wetness—around the edges of Faith’s kohl-dark eyes. “We’re all good. Let’s go get your guy and get some sparring in, huh? We need to be in shape for this mega-bitch, right? Not to mention if those wetworks fuckers come to town and try to jump us.”

“Well, uh… first I have to go get our friend Clem from the wharf. Do you… um… wanna just meet us up at Restfield, or…” Buffy was so shaken at this point that she wasn’t even sure quite how to relate to Faith anymore.

“Hell. I’ll come with. I’d like to meet a squishy demon. Besides, maybe I’ll get to throw down with these Thurgalds. They sound like players.”

Oh, hell. Now she was spoiling for a fight. “Okay, but… Don’t beat anybody up unless they deserve it, okay?”

“Yeah, sure, B. No problem.” 

They headed for the docks, tense and silent. Buffy slowed as they reached the third wharf, peering around the edges of the now dimly-lit buildings. “This one,” she whispered, damn grateful to have finally achieved their goal.

“Alright, how do you wanna…” Faith sounded equally thankful, if not breathless to get into a scrap. And, for the record, it was a tone Buffy had heard from her pretty consistently for almost all of that six months in which Faith had been a part of her life. 

/Damn./ Hindsight really sucked. “Nothing fancy,” Buffy answered, fighting to keep her voice level, and to focus on business. “They all know the rules.” Reaching up, Buffy caught the edge of the corrugated tin door, knocked briskly three times, then pulled it ajar on slightly askew hinges. “Slayer inspection!” she called through the crack.

There was a yelp, a fierce rustling, a dull, hollow bang, then, a little too high-pitched, “Uh, yeah. Sure, yeah. Uh, come on in, Slayer! W…welcome to our, uh…”

Buffy didn’t bother to wait, just pushed her way in past the heavy portal. Inside, the usual setup met her eyes. Fire barrel, a few ratty couches and loveseats pulled from the landfill, a rickety table with a Coleman lantern hissing away on it, corralled by the remains of food on paper plates; all gathered in a space that had been cleared in the midst of a bunch of opened crates formerly containing what looked to be… Machine parts of some kind? And, the bullshit-de-resistance; a hastily-thrown blanket had been tossed over something lining one of the crate-tops. The job hadn't been done properly, though, and as such they could easily make out a whole slew of jars full of a transparent, lime-colored liquid, since at least three of them peeked out from under one flapping edge.

It was far more than enough to give them away. 

/Oh, really? Just, really?/ “Hey, guys!” Buffy put in brightly as she closed with the gaggle of tall, skeletal, double-jointed demons standing there. “How’s business?”

The leader of the Thurgalds, Ragat, tilted his hollow-eyed head. “I swear to Vrill, Slayer; we stopped dealing in the Tagash venom weeks ago! You have my word…”

“Glad to hear it. So, then, those jars over there are…”

“Moonshine!” one of the other Thurgalds insisted; a short, speedy blurt. “We have a… a still! Yeah. Over out back. In the… the yard! Uh, we’re tryna make, um, vodka…”

Faith broke in at this, sounding amused. “Out of what? Cabbages or something? I’ve never seen green vodka before. Can I have a swig?”

They exchanged glances, and Ragat straightened. “Who’s the new girl?”

Buffy smiled at him. “Ragat, meet Faith. Faith, Ragat. Faith’s my sister-Slayer. She could kick your ass into next week, so don’t try any tricks… and don’t lie to her, because she’s a hell of a judge of character. Oh,” Buffy went on, straightening. “Speaking of lies, I want the truth right now. Where’s Clem?”

Ragat tried on a look of imbecilic confusion. “Who’s Clem? I don’t know a Clem. You guys know a Clem?” 

Around him, all his compatriots did their best to look bewildered, and shook their heads like mechanical toys.  They didn’t look all that confused, though, so much as concerned. And one of them, helpfully, darted a harried gaze behind a nearby crate.

“Got ‘em, Faith?”

“Yeah, I got ‘em,” she answered grimly. She already had a stake out and was tapping it on her hand. “So, boys… how long you been in town?”

Buffy sidled around between the table and one of the ratty couches to head for the crate in question. One of the dumber Thurgalds tried to jump in front of her. She kicked him in the head, dropping him like a rock. 

“C’mon, you guys. You should know better by now, unless you’re new,” Faith pointed out. “Are you new?”

“No,” Ragat admitted, looking truculent. His eyes cut to where Buffy was now rounding the crate. He radiated frustration.

Buffy peered into the dark behind the large wooden box… and made out another Thurgald, standing with her arms wrapped tight around a struggling Clem, their double-jointedness making it possible for one long-fingered hand to cover his mouth and another to hold a handful of his face-tentacles to keep him dragged back against her, a sure prisoner. 

Clem’s piggy little eyes stared at her from deep within his writhing self-defense-face, then darted over her shoulder. A warning. 

Buffy did a back-spin kick, and caught the Thurgald who had jumped off the crate above her. Boom; right in the thorax. He crashed to the ground, coughing and moaning. Swinging back, she nodded at the one holding Clem. “Alright, let him go, and maybe I’ll let you live.”

Hissing, the Thurgald female slowly released her hold and stepped back to fade into the gloom between crates. Clem promptly let his facial tentacles retract and made to straighten his vest and cargo pants. He looked a little bruised and battered, but nodded to himself, heaved a little sigh, and lifted his eyes to Buffy, seeming largely intact. 

“You okay?” she asked anyway.

“Yeah. Yeah, Slayer. I’m okay.”

“Good. Get your stuff. You’re coming to stay at the crypt till we find you a better place.”

Clem blinked, then nodded, and turned without another word to slip out of the space between crates. Buffy trailed him, eyes hard as she faced the rest of the gang. “So… you were holding him hostage why? Aside from the fact that you know I know him?”   
  
Ragat faced her down stonily, long arms folded around his body.

Clem bent to pick up a rucksack slung carelessly over the end of one of the couches. “They didn’t want me to tell you they’re still smuggling venom to some guy in town here, Slayer. Guy everyone calls ‘the Doctor’.” His red eyes were worried as he met hers again. “Tell you what; I don’t know who this guy is, but from what I heard in here, he’s bad news. Big into dark magicks. No good. Dunno what he wants Tagash stuff for, but…” He trailed off, frowning, then shrugged the ruck onto his shoulders. “I was gonna come tell you, or at least tell Spike, but they must’ve figured out what I was thinking. They were gonna keep me out of the game tonight…”

Buffy frowned and swung on the Thurgalds. “If you didn’t show up to the game, Spike would’ve come to get you. And these guys would all be having a serious issue by now. As it is, I think…” She nodded to Faith. “This is your third warning, guys. And I don’t really give that many warnings. What did I say the first time, Ragat?”

Ragat glowered at her like a spoiled ten-year-old who'd been cornered into cleaning his room. “You said I could go deal in black market venoms somewhere else, but not in your town.”

“Right. I gave you a chance to make yourself scarce. But you’re still here, and still breaking the rules.”

Ragat scowled. “The money’s better here.”

She ignored that sally. “And the second time?”

He tried for a sneer, though it came across kind of hollow. “You said you’d kill me and anyone who was helping me if you caught me dealing in your town again.”

“Bingo.” Buffy pulled out a stake, slapped it on her palm in mimicry of Faith’s move. “So, tell me why I shouldn’t keep my word. Why it wouldn’t look bad if I didn’t, since I said that in front of witnesses.”

“How many witnesses, B?” Faith asked curiously.

“Oh, about thirty, I’d say, huh Slayer?” Clem put in helpfully. “Willy’s was pretty full that night.”

“Hey, you in the back! I didn’t say you could leave!” A couple of the smarter—or at least, more enterprising—of Ragat’s crew were trying to melt away and slither out the back while their higher-ups were conversing about the semantics of following the posted guidelines. 

“Look!” one of Ragat’s guys broke in, sounding harried. “We can, uh, take you to Doc!”

“Shut  _ up!” _ Ragat hissed, but the other Thurgald was clearly terrified, and ignored him to ramble on.

“He’s the real big player! We give you Doc, you stop about twelve big scams in town, right? Not just us. He sources… I dunno. Venom, Gordok spines, dark magicks tomes… Uhhh, last week he put out an order for a Box of Gabrok…” 

Buffy cut off this rambling list with a wave of her hand. “Okay, I can see how that would benefit me, but how does it stop you from finding someone else to sell to next week?”

The Thurgald gaped at her as if she had lost her mind. “If we give you Doc, we better not just leave town. We better leave _California!_ Just in case you don’t get him, I’m not staying around here! Are you  _ kidding? _ He could curse us all if we were in Albuquerque! I for one don’t wanna be anywhere  _ near _ here if he finds out we’re the ones who…”

“We’re not giving the Slayer anything,” Ragat growled, and swung very suddenly with one overlong arm. The sharp spine on the back of his elbow pierced the talker’s throat before either of them could move. 

Their would-be informant was on the ground, gurgling in his own blood with his clawed feet kicking his death throes before Buffy could even react. 

“Aw,  _ hell _ no,” Faith muttered, and threw her stake. It flew with pinpoint accuracy to decorate Ragat’s right eye, sinking all the way to the back half of the stake. Ragat went down with a sharp bark of a laugh, keeling over like a ninepin.

All the other Thurgalds stared at one another. 

/Well, crap./ “So. Any other volunteers?” Buffy asked cheerfully.

Twenty minutes later, Sunnydale was minus seven Thurgalds, who were beating it out of town as fast as they could run and leaving behind two corpses, and she and Faith were heading up toward Restfield with Clem in tow, deep in discussion about how to go about taking down this guy ‘Doc’. “I dunno, B; the dude sounds like a big-time sorcerer type. Maybe we should hang on with that one till we’re done dealing with the Council, at least. You know; one big kahuna at a time.”

“Look,” Clem put in as he jogged behind them, “it’s none of my business, but from all the things I’ve heard about with this Doctor guy, I wouldn’t mess with him unless I had a whole coven of super-bad witches or something at my back. And I know you’ve got a couple, but… Be careful, huh?”

“Yeah,” Buffy answered softly, “we’ll think about it, Clem.”

A half an hour later, they had Clem installed in the crypt’s main space, happily muttering to himself about fridge space and ‘Just in time for  _ Jeopardy’ _ . They had informed Spike about the whole ‘Doc’ thing. Spike… hadn’t heard of him, which was worrying. It meant that either every damn demon in town had kept mum about some major player because he worked with the Slayer… or, alternatively, the rumor-mill about this Doctor guy was super underground, and you only got to hear about him if he needed you for something.

“He’s kinda low-key,” Clem told them, already all slogged out on the couch with the remote held high. “I only heard of him because they were talking about him when I was there. I guess he likes to pretend he’s no big deal. That’s how he lures you in. Like a big spider.” He sounded totally unconcerned, of course, now he was out of dire straits. “Hey… when you come back, could you bring some Funyuns?”

Team Slayer left him to it. Faith was already jogging in place in the doorway and muttering about how she had only gotten to kill one guy tonight and she was antsy. Spike slapped Clem on the shoulder, then nodded to Buffy as they exited, the other Slayer stalking on ahead, eyes everywhere. “What’s on with that one, luv? Overwhelmed?”

Buffy frowned, watching her. “I think we accidentally, um, cleared the air. About… us.”

Spike sounded abruptly deeply interested. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, um…” Buffy shrugged. “She, um, flirted with me. I… dunno if I handled it well or not.”

Spike broke into a broad, shit-eating grin. “I get a Slayer threesome, love?”   
  
She socked him hard, in the gut. “You get a bloody nose if you ever say anything like that to me,  _ ever _ again, you jerk.”

He sobered and threw an arm over her shoulder. “You know I was joking, don’t you, pet?”

Buffy held herself rigid for a second longer, then blew out her breath and seriously considered punching him harder someplace softer before she gave in and relaxed. “I hate you.”

“I know. Sorry. Just couldn’t resist.” He grinned again. “‘S just… You know.  _ Evil _ .” And he leered theatrically.

“I’m only not punching you again because I know you’re just trying to get cred back.”

“You’re sodding joking. I’m shaggin’ a Slayer. I’ve all the bloody cred in the soddin’ world.”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Pull the other one, you dope. You almost ripped Grondak’s head off the other day because he said you were all smooshy…”

Spike shot her a narrow-eyed glare, complete with pursed lips, like he thought she’d be intimidated. “First of all, he didn’t call me any such bloody thing. He said I was Slayer-whipped. Which I told him I bloody well was, and proud of it, and I’d like to see his scaly, slimy arse land a Slayer. And second of all…” He frowned then, looking briefly lost. “Not sure I have a second of all, dammit, Buffy…”

“It’s alright. I think you got lost somewhere in between ‘doing’ me and ‘did’ the other two. Maybe you should stop using that term for ‘kill’ and save it just for all the fun things we do in bed, and you won’t keep getting confused.”

“Alright, listen, you mad bint…”

They argued amiably all the way up Brislawn Street.

It was a not-quite two-mile walk to Sunset Hills Cemetery from Restfield. Sunset was one of the smaller graveyards in town, where Restfield was honestly massive, but since the smaller spot didn’t have a resident Slayer-and-Master-vamp combo, it tended to see a hell of a lot more action. It was also a sort of thoroughfare between Downtown and all the demon communities in the strip of scrub out on Sunset Ridge and Smuggler’s Bluff, and in those little housing tracts springing up around Orville. Not to mention you had to go through it to get up to Logan Swamp without getting your feet wet on the river, or wandering through a bunch of rich people’s houses and properties down on the water. 

Basically, for a smallish cemetery on the opposite end of town from the hellmouth, it was like a superhighway.

Which might explain why they actually got some action in for a change. 

They were patrolling around, getting nothing done. Faith finally threw up her hands and shrugged. “Look. I need to hit  _ somebody _ . You guys wanna spar?”

/Oh jeez./ After the conversation they had just had, Buffy wasn’t entirely sure that was the best idea, but Faith really looked ready to go off like a powder keg. She exchanged a quick glance with Spike, who shrugged slightly. /Oh well. It’s not like we can’t feel each other well enough to tag-team her if she loses her shit./

They spread out, starting with an every man for themselves approach. One-on-two, two-on-one, switching it up which teams did what, then back to all of them going all-out in a nice three-way fight. Which was stimulating as all hell, actually, once they got down to it. 

Buffy just had to stop thinking, roll with the literal punches.

Faith came in first, of course, considering her mood, with a series of lightening kickboxing moves, dirty and street and exactly her style. Spike blocked, leaned back, roared at the sky. “Alright! Let’s do this!” And then he ducked, rolled, all flaring duster… to find no target. Faith had pivoted, eyes blazing, to move in on Buffy. “Give it your best shot, B!”

Buffy, for the record, had forgotten what it was like to fight someone she couldn’t feel. 

The thing with sparring with (or fighting) Faith was, unlike a demon, there was no tingle, no sense of the opposite number’s next move, their presence, their angle of attack. She was more of… not an empty or negative space, per se… but a kind of feeling of…

It was tough to describe. Instead of a tingling feeling that drew her on, told her Slayer side where to go so she could swing with her eyes closed, instead there was a feeling almost like she was pushing against something. 

Like she was fighting a mirror. Like if she dared close her eyes for even a second, her own punch would keep coming… but at her.  Like the mirror might come alive and take her head off. 

It was riveting, terrifying, insanely real…  And bizarrely welcoming. Like to touch that mirror would be to feel whole again.

They came together, hungry. The blows flew hard and fast. Spike came in here and there, each of them spinning out of the contest to contend in turn with him, senses sparking to his presence. He was laughing aloud like a madman as one after another, they took him down, and he sprang back to his feet, elated by the fury of it all. 

In the end, though, Buffy found herself staring right into Faith’s eyes, the blows falling thick and fast… and almost exactly opposite, till it was more a wrestling match than a fight, and her sister-Slayer was leaning forward, staring into her eyes. “You still drop that shoulder, B,” she intoned conversationally. She wore a wild, furious grin, full of fight… and something Buffy now recognized as barely-suppressed libido.

Breathing hard, Buffy tried for a shrug. “So I’ve been told. Your high kicks are lazy on the left.” /Granted, I’ve gotten used to someone who’s left side is stronger…/

“Yeah? I’ll have to work on that.”

They stayed there for a sec, forearms braced against each other, hands clenched together, striving to escape the clasp and find the freedom for a punch. Then Faith surprised her by dropping her guard all of a sudden, ducking under the block to kiss her on the forehead, and rolling away. “Gonna go find something to kill.” And out of nowhere she was four feet away, grinning jauntily at Spike. “Keep an eye on her, huh, Blondie?” Before Buffy quite knew what had happened, her opposite number was striding off across the lawn, to disappear between two headstones and a mausoleum, twirling her stake. 

“Huh,” Buffy put in, breathing hard and pretty sure she should never, ever have acknowledged… well. Anything when it came to Faith. 

It was just way too complicated.

“Well,” Spike drawled, watching the other Slayer go, “that’s like to get messy.” He drew up level with Buffy, smirking. “You sure you won’t reconsider that threesome bit, love? Might just solve the whole bloody problem.” He threw her another shit-eating grin, then, hands up in surrender at her glare. “I don’t have to be all that involved.” Dropping a hand to one of his pockets, he pulled out a mint he’d purloined from the Shack the other night and dropped it to his tongue, did one of his signature head-wiggles, full of suggestion. “I could just stand about by the wall, watchin’ and giving pointers…”

/Oh jeez./ “You’re such a pig.”

“Oh, well… Knew that, yeah?” 

“Seriously, though, what am I even gonna do about…”

The whistle was low enough that Buffy didn’t even register it till after Spike was already hitting the deck. 

He'd barely heard it in time. He was almost too late. And the sight of  _ that _ would haunt her for the length of her days; the way he jerked back in that half-twist before diving awkwardly backward, hand batting the bolt to one side as he fell, head colliding with the marriage stone that had been beside his boot seconds ago, so that he almost knocked himself out.

The bolt ended up skewering his hand, which sucked, but was a damn sight better than going through his body again, and what  _ was _ it about ninja-guys sneaking around graveyards trying to shoot her guy while they were on patrol?

Buffy took off after the shooter before she even had time to think, pelting across the row of graves and between the stones for the next at top speed. She was halfway to feral-mode, seeing nothing else, ears roaring and vision tunneled, on them before the incognito assassin even had time to get up and make a break for it. Bowled him over, punched him hard, right in the head, snarling as she did so. 

He went down like a sack of potatoes. /Human. Goddamn human! What the fuck?/

She got a good look at him in the moonlight as his head lolled back, realized she recognized him, stared up in a kind of not-shocked shock at his buddy, who stared back in horror at being made and stood to bail. “Right,” he whispered, and dove away. 

He didn’t get far. Faith chose that instant to come flying back in; leaping over a headstone to roll into the fight feet-first, and kicked the second guy full in the chest. He went down like a ninepin.

With the abrupt emergence of her complementary number to the fight, Buffy’s vision very suddenly cleared, though her hearing remained kind of washed out, and she still felt a little distant. “Thanks,” she heard herself whisper, still staring at her mark. The words sounded odd, like English wasn’t quite a thing that really made sense.

“No problem.” Reaching out, Faith tugged the black beanie off of the second guy. “Huh. Guess who’s coming to patrol, huh?”

“Yeah,” Buffy answered, blank and horrified. /It’s started. Already./

Faith glanced back over her shoulder. “Your guy alright?”

“Oh. Yeah. He ducked. They only got his hand.”

“Good deal.”

“Yeah.” Buffy felt… blank. Just… blank.

“Hey, uh… B…”

“Mmm?”

“Your, uh… eyes are a little…”

Buffy blinked over at Faith. “Huh?”

Faith shook her head then, looking more startled than Buffy had ever seen her look. “Nothing. So. Whaddaya wanna do with these two idiots, huh?”

Buffy shook her head hard once to clear it, then grabbed wetworks dude number two by the lapels of his dark trenchcoat and dragged him close. After all, he was the conscious one. He could carry the message to dear old Quentin.

She still felt kind of out-of-body as she spoke her piece. “Listen. You tell the Council if they wanna come at anyone, they come at me.” 

The dude stared back, apparently mesmerized by whatever her eyes were doing, which, joy. /Go tell your boy Travers. It’s your fault, anyway./ “They don’t send you assholes to come at  _ any _ of my allies,” she went on fiercely. “You  _ got _ that? You for damn sure don’t shoot first and ask questions later.” She gave him a little shake, to ensure the words percolated past the fascination with her altered, semi-feral presentation. It was fading by now, anyway, leaving behind mostly just a scum of disgust over the top of her emotions. “ _ I’m _ the law in this town, not them. You bastards have a nice, cushy job in another country, and you think you can come in here where we risk our lives every day, and tell us how to do it?” She threw him down, hard, so he had to catch himself on his palms to keep his head from slamming into the tombstone behind him. Otherwise, it would’ve knocked him out. “Spike’s right. You’re all a bunch of wankers.”

The wetworks guy blinked, then sneered. “You don’t even know what that word means, little girl.”

Buffy snorted. “Oh, I know what it means, and I bet you do it every day, all day, till they call you for a job, because you’re bored as hell till they tell you to hunt down teenage girls who think they work for the Council. But I’ve got news for you, you unbelievable asshole. I. Don’t. Work. For. You. Neither does Faith. You, you massive prick, and all your ‘mates’? You work for  _ me _ . Now, grab your dickhead buddy and get the hell out of here; and tell Quentin Travers that if he wants to come into _my_ hellmouth and have a conversation, he better talk to  _ me _ , because I’m the damn  _ Slayer _ .” And she gave him a hard shove.  “Go _. Now _ .”

The wetworks guy scrambled back on his hands and heels, coming to his feet a good five feet from her. Faith, grinning, grabbed his unconscious friend and tossed the guy over to him one-handed. 

It must be noted that she kept the crossbow and fallen bolts as they tumbled away from his limp and lolling form.

Gaping, Wetworks Number Two picked up Wetworks One, slung him over his shoulders, and made a break for it. 

As they vanished into the dark, Faith grinned. “Well, damn. Shots fired, B.” She sounded admiring.

Behind them, Spike approached, boots crunching in the grass. He smelled a little like blood, but he would have licked the wound shut by now. He crouched easily behind them, laid his uninjured hand on Buffy’s shoulder. “Yeah. Put the cat among the pigeons, there, love.” His thumb lifted to caress Buffy’s cheek.

Buffy closed her eyes, let out a breath she felt like she’d been holding for an hour, and laid her face briefly on the back of his hand. “You okay?”

“I’ll do.”

Buffy half-turned her head toward Faith, curious. “How’d you know…”

Faith shrugged a little, blowing it off. “Felt it. Dunno. Felt like there was trouble back here. Danger. Whatever. Nothing was happening over there, so…”

/It’s the Line. The having the same demon thing./ 

Craziness.

Nodding, Buffy caught first Faith, then Spike out of her periphery, assessing their readiness. “I guess we’re gonna do this,” she murmured. 

“Well, I don’t know about you,” Faith answered, standing, “but I’ve had enough fun for tonight.” And swiveling, she headed back toward the cemetery gate.

Buffy watched her go for a second, then shuffled back on her toes, still squatting, to lean back into Spike’s body.

His arm went around her, and she closed her eyes for a second in his embrace. And realized only then that she was shaking all over. 

Someone had tried to take her mate from her. She knew exactly who it was. And they were going to  _ pay _ . “They’re here, I guess,” she heard herself murmur.

Spike’s fingers stroked down along her arm. Buffy moved to catch his injured hand, lifted it to her lips, kissed the damaged center of his palm. He shivered slightly against her body, tightened his hold around her. “Yeah,” he agreed.

/And they’re after my guy. And, probably me, now. Happy anniversary to us./

His fingers continued lightly stroking her; an attempt to bring her back down. Probably unlikely to happen, at this point. “Yeah,” she repeated, shakily, because they both knew what that meant. "Game time."

“Bloody hell.”

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


If you didn't catch it, the above was Spike essentially reliving Beatrice and Benedick from _Much Ado About Nothing_. IMO Spuffy are definitely far more B&B than _Romeo and Juliet_ , despite my story title (R&J is far more a Bangel issue). That pivotal scene from _Much Ado_ , being quoted here (if somewhat modified), seemed really perfect for the business with Giles, and definitely something our former William would think of, given the circumstances. 

Ok, on to a Meta Moment:  
  
I posit that Buffy's demony side is a bit more visible in this version, since she's all awakened from being mated to another demon (and that maybe the feral side of her was a bit less obvious, physically-speaking, when we saw her right after her resurrection, because trauma holding her back)... because let's face it. Sineya? acted way more demony than she acted human. I also think that was what the ancient Watchers were offering to Buffy; the power Sineya received from being mostly demony, which was what allowed Sineya to fight the first vamps, the Turok-Han, successfully, not to mention taking out Archaeus and Maloker! Which leads me to...   
  
I'm gonna stop there, because I'm in danger of typing out a whole, like, four paragraphs of meta that don't belong in the end notes, and you all don't need to be subject to a bunch of ranting that belongs in fic, so I'll save it for other venues. I could go on for ages on this stuff, which all ties in with the dang Council, which... Here we go round the mulberry bush with those jerks!   



	29. Chapter 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Getting them CoW folks all riled up and ready to be checkmated in my ver. of Checkpoint! HEE! First we have to lay down a challenge they can't refuse.

“What in the name of God possessed you, Buffy, to issue that sort of challenge to Quentin?”

Buffy shook her head. “They tried to kill my mate, Giles.”  


Giles gaped at her, horrified, from his throne commanding the center of the couch. “Yes, but we knew that they might…”

“No.” There was to be no discussion on the matter.

Faith smirked a little, breaking the stalemate. “It was pretty badass, G-man. You shoulda heard her. She told those wetworks assholes what it was all about.”

“Problem bein’,” Spike broke in, “next, they’re like to come after her.” He was flicking madly at his peeling Bic, clearly fighting hard not to show how close he was to a minor breakdown at the thought.  
  
"Oh God..." Xander groaned from his spot perched on the arm of said couch. 

Willow, sitting next to Giles, was looking all amazed. “You think they’ll actually try to kill you if you protect him?”

“You didn’t see her,” Faith put in, and shook her head a little. “She looked…” Then she frowned and shot a quick glance over at Spike. “Is that… a thing that happens now? And is it because you two are doing that kinky biting shit, or what?”  
  
/Yeah, about that…/   
  
"Oh God," Xander muttered again, this time with a wholly other intonation.  
  
"Oh, Xander, stop it," Anya silenced him, and leaned forward, looking thoroughly interested. "Tell us. What do her eyes do? It sounds like something unique in the annals of the two-souled..."  
  
Buffy flinched and swung on her vampire. “Okay, spill. What do my eyes do when I go all feral-Slayer-chick? Because you’ve never said  _ anything _ .”

Spike eyed her for a sec, wearing that expression of his that was somewhere in between wary and admiring, then very clearly threw caution to the wind and donned his ‘what the hell, she’s gonna kick my ass anyway’ look. “Love, you look bloody terrifying. You know that. Never mentioned it because it was just part of the whole soddin’ package, but your eyes do get a bit lighter…”

“Lighter.” She waited, narrowing said eyes on him, to skewer him with a gaze that brooked no omissions. 

“Hell. Alright. Didn’t want you to get all skittish on me and start hiding from that part of yourself, innit? But you know your eyes have green in them, and gold, and brown; they’re multifarious and lush, verdant gardens…”

Buffy held up a hand. “I love you, and you can write me a poem about my eyes later, William. What do they do, specifically, when I’m being demon-girl? Last chance, before I pull out the commandy big guns.”

He sighed, flickered a helpless glance at their audience. 

No one looked disposed to help him. Everyone else was an inquiring mind, too. 

“Oh, bloody hell,” he whispered, and turned back to Buffy, and now he looked like a guy standing in front of a firing squad. “Alright, pet. You want to know, I’ll tell you. They go gold. Bit like a vamp’s.”

Buffy froze. “They… go gold.”

“Not in the same way, mind. More in the same way any chit with hazel eyes can see their eyes shift about dependin’ on mood, what they wear, yeah? Your eyes are greener some moments, even edge into blue sometimes, slip a bit into the light brown some days… and drift into the golds, on occasion. Depends on what’s happening. It’s just… in that case, they’re mostly into the latter category. Nothing specifically…”

Buffy flung up a hand to cut off his uncharacteristic hedging. “Are we talking, big cat gold, or demon gold?”

Spike very wisely shut his mouth.

“Oh, wow.” She could have gone happily to her grave without ever knowing this.

“Didn’t want to alarm you, love. I don’t think it’s…”

Buffy resumed her hand-lifting. She needed a minute. It was one thing to know she was demon-girl on some level, another entirely to know that it had acquired a visible manifestation.   
  
"Giles, is this in the _Vampyr_ book?" Willow asked, apparently fascinated. "Because I've never seen it."  
  
Giles muttered something inaudible, sounding pained.

“You know,” Faith put in after a sec, “now I wanna know what mine look like when I lose my shit.” She sounded more just interested than alarmed, which was kind of unfair.

Buffy didn’t answer. She actually wondered if Faith had ever gone that far into her Slayerness. She had definitely lost herself more than once, but was that a Slayer thing, or just a general ‘flinging herself into the love of chaos and battle and bloodlust’ thing? 

Did it take being mated and needing to protect said mate to really go there, or could any Slayer find that part of herself? “Giles?” she heard herself ask, shakily.

“I… am not entirely sure, Buffy,” Giles answered. He, too, sounded shaken.

Buffy bit her lip, and fought to stay on task. Was he shaken because he was afraid of her now, or afraid  _ for _ her? 

And did it matter right now? Because right now, outside forces were in town and wanted to dust Spike. /And probably kill me too. Because they know for sure now that my demon-side is way dialed up and awake, they can see it in my eyes, and…/

And yes, it  _ did _ matter, because she needed to know that Giles was still on her side, and wasn’t going to turn on her at the last minute, turn her over to them, or… “They’ve seen me go… well, not quite full-on, primal Slayer,” Buffy whispered, partially in answer to Willow’s earlier question, but her eyes were on her Watcher. “But I was on the edge. Yeah. They’re gonna come after me, too.”   
  
And she waited for a sign, ignoring Xander's faint "Ohman, ohman"s, being chanted in the background.  
  
Giles lifted his eyes, very slowly, to meet hers. Then he sighed and pulled his glasses off, which could go either way. Polished them, to buy himself time, looking down into them as he rubbed furiously. 

When he lifted them back to his face, seated them over his ears, he seemed resolute. And when he met her eyes, they were steely with determination. 

They did not waver on her face. “Yes, well, when they do, they’ll be coming against a concerted force of far more than just one Slayer and a vampire. That much is certain.”

Buffy let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. And realized only then that she had been trembling slightly.

Spike’s hand on her arm twitched, and then his arm was pulling her around so that her back was to his chest. Tugged her down till she was in his lap, and him half-sitting against the phone-table.

She closed her eyes and went gratefully, just breathing for a moment until the ground was stable beneath her once more.

Giles didn’t care. To him, she hadn’t changed in the last ten minutes. She was still ‘Buffy’, to him.

“We can take ‘em, B,” Faith was saying.  
  
"Yeah," Xander chimed in, straightening. "I mean, like we're gonna let those jerks just come into town and..."

“To hell with that!” Spike interrupted abruptly. He was growling, everything about him setting Buffy's hairs on edge. He sounded, felt, bloodcurdlingly vampirical right now, and he seemed to have taken up her tremors, made them his own. “Let’s just bloody well leave ‘em to it.”

Now  _ that _ , Buffy had not expected. “What…” she began, eyes snapping open. 

“Why the fuck are we stayin’, love?” Spike demanded before she could build any steam. “This town’s too soddin’ populated with bastards right now, innit? We should just take Dawn and Joyce and bugger off.” He was up now, his gaze flickering, sapphire-dark and intense, to one side. “You too, Faith, if you want to come, but any road, let the bastards chase their tails here looking for a rogue Slayer as doesn’t live here anymore. The blonde bitch as well. Go take that vacation you’ve deserved for who the bloody hell knows how long, pet…”

Buffy pulled away to swing around and stare at her mate, amazed. “I can’t just leave! I have a  _ Calling _ .”

Spike’s truculent expression didn’t alter a whit. “Sod the Calling.”

To say that she was staggered was an understatement. “Spike! I can’t just say to hell with the Calling! The last time I did that, people  _ died! _ I ran away and kids in my school got eaten by fledges! I… what do you call it? Faltered at my post! I let everyone down. I…”

Out of nowhere, Spike exploded. “You bloody well did not! You weren’t even their girl anymore, and this wasn’t their hotspot. You  _ died _ , Buffy! You did your sodding duty and went tits-up for them trying to off the bloody Master. You did your bit for king and country and that’s  _ all _ you owed the buggers!” It was like he was getting something off his chest that he’d been dying to say for a very long time. She could only stare at him in horror as he spouted his heresy. “The next chit in line had the onus from then on; whatever her bloody name was. Kendra; then Faith here.  _ Not _ you!”

“While I understand, Spike, the point that you are attempting to…” Giles began.

Spike swung on Giles, snarling. “Sod off, Watcher. You’ve kept her nose to the grindstone for years when it hasn’t even been her lookout, and you bloody well  _ know _ it! You even let them put her through that soddin’ shitstain of a test when it wasn’t hers to take…”

Giles flinched back against couch cushions, drained of color, and went absolutely silent. He didn’t even stammer.

Buffy was absolutely floored. “Wh…”

Spike cut her off, riding now on sheer, blind rage long held-back. _“Dammit,_ Buffy! _Everything_ you’ve done for them since you first marched down there like a brilliant madwoman to fight Nest has been bleedin’ pro-bono work, don’t you _see_ that? You owe them jack shit! You owe the sodding _world_ jack shit! No more pain, no more death, no more sacrifices. No more of your love or loss or your sleepless nights, no ‘college for slaying’; bloody _none_ of it! You didn’t even owe them that sodding _Cruciamentum_ , and you know I’m bloody well going to have words with the bastards over that!”   
  
Wil and Xander and Anya were watching this like a volleyball match, mouths hanging agape. /Oh God.../ Everything inside Buffy was quaking. She felt like she might throw up. “Spike…” 

“No! Bloody  _ no!” _ He shot to his feet, so that she tumbled off his lap, barely keeping her feet, and cut his hand across his body in a hard, diagonal slash. And his eyes were hard, on fire. “You owe them, and us,  _ nothing _ , Buffy.  _ Everything _ you do now, you do because you  _ choose _ to; because you’ve a drive in you says you need to. And that’s  _ all _ you have to answer to.  _ Nothing _ else.” His eyes drove deep into her skull, demanding she admit his point. “Every other bloody thing is Council brainwashing.”

Faith eyed him for a sec, then turned her dark gaze on the shaken Buffy, looking her up and down. “The vamp’s got a point, B.”

Buffy jerked her eyes briefly away from her thoroughly pissed off vampire to stare at her sister-Slayer for a second, amazed. But then, of course Faith would think she could just walk away, even if she was the legitimate holder of the Line. But it wasn’t like that! /I can’t just…/ “He… You…”

“I mean, I may have fucked up, before,” Faith went on equably, “but that was kind of the plan, wasn’t it, before I roped you back into the gig by going off-script? I was gonna handle the job while you took a powder and went to college in Chicago or some damn place? Inherit the hellmouth, the Watcher, the whole nine yards.” 

Buffy stared at Faith, jolted by the new realization that Faith wasn’t saying she thought any Slayer could walk away… but that she thought it was her gig to stay, and that Buffy was taking on too much. 

Faith shrugged. “I always did say you kinda had a stick up your ass, B. Didn’t think you’d let these pricks use it to fuck you. I’m with boyfriend, here.”

It didn’t make any sense. 

None of it made any sense. Faith, standing here… taking responsibility for the Line? Spike, telling her to abandon everything they had built together here in their town, their territory, to just… take Dawn and… And bail?

/And confirm everything they believe about… about me being a rogue Slayer, running off with my vampire. We’d be hunted forever. We’d never be able to come back. We’d never have a home again. We’d never rest. And…/ 

She was terrified of what she might see in Giles’ eyes. Of the condemnation she might see of her most important relationship. “Spike,” she breathed, and prayed he would understand, floundered for something,  _ anything _ he might  _ hear _ . Some common ground that might hook him, or… “this is my  _ town _ .  _ Our _ town. Even if the humans have other people to… the demons here count on just  _ us _ .” 

“They’ll get on, love,” he countered flatly, relegating everyone from human to demon to the ‘meh’ category. “They always have before.” An ironic smile twisted his lips. “‘Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.’”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Spike…” Giles had apparently been rendered briefly mute by his outburst, but at this he seemed honor-bound to break in. Probably that had been some sort of ancient-quote-mangling. “I understand your ire; truly I do, but Buffy could no more…”

Buffy flung up a hand to interrupt her Watcher. She couldn’t  _ believe _ this. Moreover, she was horrified. “Don’t quote dumb old Shakespeare crap at me to try to convince me of… whatever dumb thing, Spike! Look; is this because of the dream? Because me being free doesn’t mean I can just walk away! It means the  _ opposite _ , or I’ll end up turning into exactly what they fear the most! It’s a lot just asking to be paid—which, if I leave, I’ll have thrown that chance away; for me, for Faith, for every Slayer from here on down, forever—because then they might think I won’t help people if they don’t pay me first. ‘Sorry; can’t get that demon off you unless you pass me a cool fifty.’ But just walking  _ away _ … I have  _ powers _ . If I don’t use ‘em to help people, that makes me  _ evil!  _ We could never come home! We could never sleep again! They’ll hunt us forever…”

Spike gaped at her as if she’d lost her damn mind. “How the bloody hell does it make you evil, if you go and use those powers some other sodding place, Slayer? I never said you had to stop! You wouldn’t be  _ you _ if you did! You’re off your bird if you think I want to change you that much!” He shook his head hard, looking about ready to grab his hair with both hands and rip it out. “You think I’m mad enough to try? That I’d even  _ want _ to? I love everything  _ about _ you, you insane chit! Figured we’d just take our services elsewhere till they woke up to what they’d missed, yeah? I only said leave ‘em to their own devices  _ here _ , in this bleedin’ wreck of a hellmouth!” And when she gaped at him, stunned, “It’s a bargaining chip, yeah? They want you here, tell ‘em they have to treat you right!”

/Okay,  _ what? _ / Sometimes his brain just didn’t make any sense to her. “How could I  _ sleep _ at night if I did that? I can’t just turn this off! I can’t walk away and not worry! God, Spike, this is  _ your _ town too! After everything we’ve worked so hard to build here, don’t you  _ care?  _ Don’t you feel like… this is your place?” He  _ had _ to! If he didn’t, then how could she…   
  
Something passed through his eyes then, and he tilted his head in that way he had, as if he were examining her. As if he had never seen her before. And his eyes went strangely dark for a sec. “I see it. I finally see it, love. I think it took… feeling it from you.” Letting out a deep breath, he laid his palms on his thighs, nodded. “Alright. So, this is a territory for you. The place, everyone in it. Hell, what they’ve done to you birds…”

/Huh?/ “Spike, what…”

“It’s like breedin’ sheepdogs from wolves. They took the instinct,” Spike told them all grimly, “the one says a place is a hunting grounds? And made it a place where everything in it is something you own, the way a nest does, the way a Master does; but you don’t get to hunt in it for food, ‘cause you’re part-human. You don’t eat the things as live inside the territory anymore. Instead you have to protect everyone in it from others who might hunt in it, same as if you were keepin’ ‘em all to yourself, for your own food-source. It’s how they got you to fight us. Competition over the Happy Meals, ‘cept you don’t eat ‘em, ‘cause you kept the human appetites.” He nodded once, slow. “It’s how we can hold the town together. It’s like bein’ a mated pair at the apex of a nest. There’s that much room at the top of the food pyramid, but none for it below, when it’s a territory. Only if you’re the alphas of the pack.”

“Wh…” Buffy began, amazed at his ruminations, but he only kept on, sounding pensive and fascinated. 

“I see it. See how they did it. Christ, what a mindfuck your lads did, Watcher. Clever work,” he allowed, with a nod to Giles, who was staring at him with an open mouth and a drained countenance. “Hell of a spell. It worked damned well all this time. Because the only real difference they needed to put in is to twist in the human bit of instinct where you have that odd bit of pack-bonding says any bloody sap you come across, and even the odd dog or goldfish, is worthy of havin’ a name and a story an’ the like. Mix that in with the bit where every person is necessary and important to the ecosystem you’re protectin’ because they’re  _ yours _ … an’ everything in your instincts rebels if even one of your charges dies.” His eyes flitted to Faith. “Fucked you up real good when you did one in, didn’t it, luv.” 

A shadow crossed Faith’s features, and she froze into a statue of herself, there against the French doors. Meanwhile, over on the other side of the room, Anya was nodding as if this all made perfect sense, Xander was gaping, and Wil was staring as if she were stunned, but rapidly filing something into slots in her brain, and, just... /No. _What?_ / 

“Probably why you’re runnin’ off half-cocked all the bleedin’ time, then,” Spike opined, eyes still on the alter-Slayer. “Don’t have a territory of your own. And before, you and Buffy were fighting over this one; whose it was, which of you was top sheepdog, all while takin’ care of the herd together. Only thing maybe held you both in concert was you had wolves to fight; blokes like me runnin’ about thinning it all the soddin’ time, ‘cause otherwise, you can’t work too well together. You’re not pack animals. You’re both alphas, always will be. But havin’ us about gave you something else to concentrate on besides attacking each other.” 

Buffy had no idea what to make of any of this. The problem was that it fit. It really fit; far too well. And he just kept going, like he was having  _ revelations  _ about them. 

“Then you went off, Faith, to find someone else to give you a legitimate claim to the territory and the herd…” Faith started visibly. “And you got to go head-to-head over the territory. But Buffy won, and you’ve ceded the claim. You’re off wandering about looking for your own territory now, and all’s right between you two again. You can be a beta when you're here, now, and be right with it.”

“Oh, wow…” Willow whispered, sounding amazed.

Faith’s eyes drifted to Buffy, looking enlightened… and more than a little thoughtful. Buffy just felt poleaxed; and a little like she’d been stuffed with cotton. “Wh…”

“A territory. Alright, then.” Spike appeared to be assimilating this new information. When his eyes turned back to Buffy’s, they were like lasers on hers. “Love. Pet. I do care about your territory; inasmuch as I’ve ever cared about any place.” His voice went grim. “But not in the same way, because it’s not in my wiring. I care about it because it’s a place I live in, and because I’ve become fond. But it’s  _ your  _ territory, pet. You’re the alpha. I’m your… enforcer. I’m your… consort in the power-structure. When I fight to keep it, I’m doing it for  _ you _ . I’m helping to hold it for you. I’m doing it to support your place… and I care because it’s yours.” 

His eyes softened on hers. “But, Buffy, I’ll always care about you more. You’re my mate. And yeah, I’ve always understood that it’s a Calling for you, where it isn’t for me; and maybe I’ll never fully understand that bit. And I hear the other part now; that for you this is… a personal territory, where it isn’t for me.” He paused, seemed to reorganize his thoughts. “Or, rather, it is, but not in the same way. For me it’ll always be… a hunting ground. A sort of… managed park, like the kings had in Jolly Old, ‘cept I don’t go in after the deer the way I used to. Instead, because it’s the Queen’s Wood now instead of the King’s, I go in, I catch a fish, and I release it, and I enjoy my sport, but I don’t hunt to kill anymore, do you understand, Slayer? I’m the consort who has privilege to hunt in my Queen’s Wood, but it’s not… mine. I’m the park’s ranger.”

“How very fascinating,” Giles breathed from the far side of their little tableau.

It  _ wasn’t _ fascinating. It was agonizing. Buffy couldn’t even word, she was so blown away by his very alien point of view. “Spike, I…”

“So maybe,” Spike went on, determined and grim, “I’ll never fully understand your need to protect this land, these people, either. But, love; hear me out. If you could, at least just in your head, and for a short time, separate the territory from the Calling, you’d see that the bit about it having to be done  _ here; _ that’s  _ voluntary _ for you, pet. And your dedication to the business despite the fact you could walk away anytime is  _ why _ I volunteer to help you, when I could walk away anytime, and sod this bloody burgh.” His eyes on hers were azure as summer skies, and pointed as javelins, gouging into hers. “Because if it means this bleedin’ much to you, keepin’ this territory safe, then come hell, high water, or the sodding second coming of Maloker, I’ll see it safe for you, if I dust doing it. Anything to keep that smile on your face at the end of the day, and the tears from falling from your eyes. But for all of me it could fall into the earth, what it does to you. But you have to understand… if it comes to a choice between you and this fucking place… I’m going to choose you, every time, and to hell with every other sod here. Because you, Buffy, are my goddamned  _ religion _ .”

He hated it. He hated her… her place, because it was like… a competition. Because he had to share her with the world. “I…”

His voice softened. “I'm not trying to take anything away from you, love. I know bein' the Slayer is as much a part of what you are as bein' my brilliant girl who can quip like hell on wheels but has a tough time tellin' me her feelings, and who loves like the sun. But I just want you to understand... you don't have to do it  _ their _ way. You don't belong to them. You can be the Slayer on your own time and your own dime. You belong to no one but yourself!”

Everything in Buffy’s being ran up against a brick wall at the very thought that she didn’t belong to… To the people who depended on her. She knew she didn’t belong to the Council, but Spike was positing a kind of freedom that she simply could not accept. “I do belong,” she whispered, and shook her head; felt like she had been shaking it in negation of his point since long before he had finished his speech. “I belong to everyone who depends on me. You don’t… You don’t understand, Spike. Yeah… the Council had it wrong. They always will. I’m not theirs. But I am… everyone else’s.”

Spike shot to his feet, flinging his hands away from his body. “Bloody fuck, Buffy!”

Giles sighed, leaning back, and removed his glasses to polish them. Set them back on his face, and narrowed them to pin her vampire with a gimlet gaze. “The difficulty here, Spike, is that you have been made to be a creature who seeks only your own survival and enjoyment; all hedonism. Buffy has not tried to change you except insofar as was required that you might live together without killing each other. And that is, of course, a very great change, but it is one you have accepted freely. The question remains, then… how much must she change in turn, Spike, and how much more can  _ you _ bend, in order to remain bound to a creature made and bred to the bone to be of service to others, even to the negation of her very self?”

“Fuck…” he whispered, clearly horrified by the very thought.

Faith was still for a moment, then sighed. “Look. I’m probably the last one to chime in on this. Buffy’s whole martyr thing doesn’t make sense to me…” She shot a glance up at Spike, shrugged. “Except when it does. Because when I was on my way out of town with Angel, all chained up and pissed off at everyone, and all I wanted to do was leave—just bail, you know, and fuck everyone—we heard about this church on the edge of town, with a bunch of vamps holding people hostage. Angel was sitting there at the motel, seriously thinking of ways to help even though he would’ve probably fried trying to get over there, because it was like ten in the morning. Martyr guy, just looking all upset and helpless…” She sighed heavily. “And that was when I knew. I couldn’t escape it. This thing we are. Because I knew I’d rather go fuck up those vamps, even if I didn’t give a shit about the people in there, even though I was pissed off at everybody in the world… Because that was just the human part of me. The Slayer part of me… will always need to protect people and do the job, no matter what…”

Buffy didn’t remotely like where this story was going.

“…And you know what? Angel trusted that part of me, even though I coulda run, and he couldn’t’ve stopped me, because it was the middle of the fucking day. He unchained me, and let me go dust those vamps…”

/He  _ what? _ /

"Wait, he _what?"_  
  
Yay for Xander, who would apparently always voice Buffy's thoughts aloud for her.  
  
Faith ignored the outburst, eyes on Buffy's. “I guess I coulda run after that.” She answered Buffy's incredulous stare with a faint smile and a shrug. “But I had nowhere else to go, so I came back. Because I needed him to help me figure myself out, and because he gave me that chance; to prove… whatever the hell it was I’d needed to prove to myself. Or I got something out of my system, I guess. Whatever. And I knew…” She shot another glance at her aghast sister, while Buffy was still sitting there horrified at the realization that Angel had taken such a huge chance. “…That I could never get away from being what I was. So I might as well just give in and go back to being a white-hat… or at least whatever counted as a white-hat for me, working with his ass in LA. Because I can’t really be anything else, can I?” And her eyes flickered over to Spike’s. She gave him a minuscule little nod. “I wouldn’t been so fucked up over killing that guy if I didn’t have some kinda programming that says I have to take care of ‘em instead.”

Spike was watching Faith with a really odd look on his face. After a second, his shoulders slumped, and Buffy felt a wash of something like defeat blow over him; something huge enough to swamp all his frustration and ire. “Fine, then,” he breathed. “We’ll face the bastards down. But I don’t bloody like it.”

Buffy stared at him, wondering what the hell had just happened to change his tack. “Spike, what…”

“Never mind, pet. Tell you later.”

Buffy wasn’t about to let it go. “Spike…”

He shook his head, not meeting her gaze. And said something she had never once expected him to say in mixed company. “Euchre.”

/Oh. Oh, man. That is so not fair./ “Fine,” she snapped, startled and stymied, and leaned back, arms crossed, to subside into the corner of the couch. 

Giles opened his mouth, shut it, cleared his throat, and spent a little time looking thoroughly baffled. “I don’t understand. You’d… like to play cards, Spike?”

Buffy might have started laughing if she wasn’t about to cry. “No, Giles. He doesn’t want to play at all, anymore.”

Faith started grinning. So did Anya. Xander frowned in confusion. Willow also looked briefly perplexed, but then an expression of sudden comprehension crossed her face. Her eyes lit on Buffy, flitted back to Spike, and something touched her lips that wasn’t quite amusement, but might have been the beginnings of it. 

Giles’ confusion spread. He was utterly at a loss now. “Ah, alright. Well… as to the question of…”

Buffy cut him off with a head-shake. “They didn’t bother to come in and talk first. They sent their goons. They’re not coming to make nice or discuss Glory-killing methods, whatever they say when they actually get here. We need to keep that in mind.” Pushing herself to her feet, she headed for the foot of the stairs. “We have lookouts stationed in the demon grapevine. The second they show up in town and start poking into our business, our people’ll let Spike know. Or me or Faith, I guess, if someone runs into us first. I’m going to bed.”

She could feel Spike’s eyes on her back as she headed around the newel post; point-person for the entire mob of shocked stares. “Damn, B,” Faith called as she hit the third step, “trouble in paradise?”

“Uh… maybe stay out of it, Faith?” Willow asked, sounding worried.

“Better watch your step, Blondie,” Faith put in, clearly unconcerned. 

“I… ah, believe I’ll show myself out. Willow, do you want a ride back to campus?” Giles sounded very willing to get the hell away from the scene of discord.

“Oh. Yeah. Thanks.”

The door opened and shut behind Buffy’s back. “Have fun dealing with a pissed off Buffy,” Faith tossed in Spike’s direction, her voice drifting up from the kitchen.

Spike didn’t answer. She heard his footsteps, though, as he trailed her upstairs. 

She waited for him, held the door. When he entered the bedroom, she closed it behind him and just waited. He merely shook his head and made for the window, stood leaning over with his palms on the sill, staring out into the side-yard, lit by a one-quarter moon that made odd-shaped shadows out of the cycad and the squatty, well-trimmed pampas-grass in the neighbor’s yard; the one the city kept insisting they remove because it was taking over the local plant-life and was an invasive non-native species with an evil root-system of death. 

The tall, white plumes of the South American grassoid wavered slightly in the light breeze outside. Buffy could hear it swishing through the cracked sash. 

Spike’s voice was low enough that it could almost be mistaken as part of the night at first. “If you get yourself killed by these bastards as a Christmas present, Buffy, I’ll never forgive you for it.” 

/Oh. Man./ “Um, ditto? But also, what the hell was all that? And… after all that, what made you change your mind all the sudden?” 

His shoulders hunched up around his neck, preparatory to his pushing himself away from the window, and then he exhaled; a short, abrupt and impatient sound, and flipped around, seating the heels of his hands on the sill to watch her warily in the dark. “What can I say, Slayer? You’re a very convincing chit.”

Buffy narrowed her eyes at him. /Right. Like that’s all it took, was me being ‘convincing’./ “So… you’re  _ engaged _ , is what you’re saying?” She did her best to invest the word with as much uncertainty as she could manage, considering the circumstances. It was a tone that said, ‘Explain it to me, Spike. Convince me.’

Spike sighed heavily, and if possible, his shoulders tensed even further. “If that bird Faith is as tied to it as you are…” He lifted one hand away from the windowsill to wave it in the air, as if flicking away a landing bird. “…Then nothing I can do to fight it, pet.”

“Wait. So you’re saying Faith is…”

Indigo eyes pierced her in the low light. “She’s the soddin’ control group, love. She’s no territory. She’s as free as any Slayer can get. And yet she’s found herself as bound to the Calling as you are. She’s tried to get free, and all it did was near-destroy her.” His gaze dropped to the dresser beside him, and turning away from her, he toyed a little with her music box. Opened it, so that ‘Swan Lake’ tinkled quietly on the air between them at half-speed, the miniature, be-feathered skater twirling slowly on the mirrored ‘ice’ on her endless revolutions. “Do I want to destroy you, I can keep pushing, but it would unmake all about you that I love. Your sincerity, your dedication, even that maddening insistence that you have on doing what you think is bloody well right, and to hell with every other consideration.” The box slid closed. “You’d be safer… but you wouldn’t be you anymore. I’d have lost you, either way.”

His head rose once more, and he was staring out into the night once more, his arms dangling listlessly at his sides; frighteningly still. “And it’d be at my hands, not theirs, that you’d have been undone. So…” A little shrug. “I’ll stay. I’ll take the risk of seeing you killed, because at least I’ll be fighting at your side to preserve all that you are; and hell if they’ll touch a hair on your head.” His voice went unutterably harsh then, and terrifyingly cold, even as he faced out, away from her; the tones Spike only used when he was afraid he was about to say something that would draw a line between them. “But Buffy?” 

Buffy stared at his taut back, uncertain even what to think or feel. “Yeah?” she asked, warily.

“If they harm you… I dunno that I can control myself. I might very well lose the plot. I don’t know if that’ll destroy us…” His hand rose to hold aside the drapes, as if he thought she might cast him out tonight; as if he might have to prepare to make his departure. “…But I’d like to think I should get the same latitude as you get.” His voice went rough then. “You were about to kill those bastards for comin’ after me. You’ve said before that you might kill a human if he managed to dust me. I’d like to think that if any stuck-up ponce decided to damage my mate, and succeeded, that I might get the chance for the same sort of vengeance…” She heard the tremor that hit his voice then, for all he was fighting to keep it steady. “Or at least, that you say you’d understand me losin’ it and doin’ the bastard in, without you havin’ to walk away from me for it.”

/Oh./ 

Buffy closed her eyes briefly, and waited to speak until she was sure not only of her answer, but of the steadiness of her voice as she made it. When she felt she was, she opened her eyes again, and let out a slow breath. “I told Xander, before,” she began carefully, “that as long as there are… mitigating circumstances… I mean, we get them too. With the law, even. Which means… why shouldn’t you get the same… consideration?”

Spike nodded, back still to her and eyes resolutely pointed facing out the window. “Appreciate it, love.” But the tension between them had stilled, just a little.

She bit her lip. There had been so much today. Too much. Clem, and Faith, and almost losing him, and almost killing a guy, and then this conversation, and… “Please, Spike, can we just… I don’t know if I…”

He exhaled, abrupt and loud in the gloom. “I’m very, very brassed off, love. And I’m so bloody terrified I might lose you, I don’t even know how to breathe.”

She got that. “I know.”

“If we were in the crypt, I’d shag you hard till you were screaming; to let you know about it. But we’re here, and…” She saw his shoulders shake, bit her lip. Nodded.

“Go outside.”

He froze. “Beg pardon, pet?”

“I’ll follow you.”

He was still for another long moment, then without another word he dragged the sash the rest of the way up and bent to slip out through the window, moving smoothly as a piece of night.

She followed after a moment, slipping out over the lintel of the window with the ease of long practice, though she hadn’t had to do this in a while. It was dangerous right now, of course. The house was probably under surveillance… but really? She honestly didn’t give a damn at the moment. They probably already knew. 

/To hell with the Council./ To hell with everything. They needed each other. 

She could sense him, around by the one tree; the fir or pine or whatever it was in the front yard. He stood with his back against it, around on the one side facing away from the house and the street, with a little bit of a bushy hedge sort of thing between them and the neighbor. She met him there, pressed against him. And breathed him in. 

He didn’t take his hands out of his pockets at first, everything in him a tense, vibrating lightning rod. “Not gonna be able to be…”

/Gentle./ She knew it. “I don’t want you to be.”

He nodded, a zephyr in the dark, vaguely lit by distant streetlamps. And then his hands were on her shoulders and she was swinging around to slam hard against the rough bark of the tree, and her skirt was up, and she was fumbling to help; had his zipper down, and that was all they had time for… and probably that was going to pinch, and his belt buckle would be…

And then he had her panties thrust aside and he was slamming into her, and  _ fuck _ . His belt buckle was, indeed, cold and hard, striking furiously against her clit, and she must have lost her mind, because her legs spasmed up to wrap around his waist, and she found herself grinding hard against the smooth breadth of it, meeting his every clashing thrust with her nails digging into his neck, one hand over her head to cling to the stump of an excised tree branch while he stared at her for a second in shock, then buried his face in her neck, wrapped his arms around her waist… and then slowed.

“Buffy, Buffy,” he chanted into her throat, and his fingers had slid underneath her blouse to find her skin. “Just don’t ever leave me.”

“I won’t,” she told him. “I can’t.” And pulled him in with her heels; a furious urging, and loosed her nails to slide her hand into his hair. He could’ve been dust tonight. “You don’t either.”

“God, no.” And then he was going again, and she was going with him, and it lasted a very short time, because they were both very, very afraid. 

It ended on the ground, with her astride him, looking into his eyes while she rode out the last of their mutual tremors. While the quarter-moon reflected in his worried gaze, and his anxiety poured into the both of them through their link. So she leaned over to press a kiss to his lips; because she felt the same. “No one takes you from me. No one takes me from you. Okay? No matter where we are. Because you’ve always been a part of me, and I’ve always been a part of you. Since the beginning.” /That’s what they’re afraid of. I’ve figured it out. We’ve been a part of each other since the beginning of time. Let no one put us asunder./

Spike pulled her down, dragged her to his chest, buried his lips in her hair. “From beginning to end, Buffy,” he whispered. “My alpha and my omega. You.” And his voice throbbed with sincerity as he said it.

It was so much. Almost too much. And it was hers to bear.

Hers to love. Because he was the same. /You’re why I was  _ made _ ./

And if he was why she would end…

Well, that was always how it was going to be, anyway. At least, this time, they had chosen their own road to that final meeting.

***

Willy sent word a day later. Hardly any time at all to get situated, or to figure out any strategy. It came through Thomas, the Ferava with the cherry-cigarillo fetish. “Hey, Slayer,” the tall, clawed demon informed them, leaning back against a mausoleum near the college, and twirled one of his fragrant, ever-present smokes. “Got a message for you.”

“Oh?” Buffy had been training with Faith, who had met her while she walked back from campus. “What’s up?” But she hadn’t been able to still the chill that had run up her spine, belly to bone, at the unexpected meeting.

“Yeah. From Willy. ‘They’re here kid.’”

“Oh.” / Short and sweet and, oh, shit./ Buffy held her breath for a second, then let it out to shoot a glance at Faith, who had dropped her boxing stance to face down their visiting demon. “That it?”

Thomas shrugged and turned to head back for the nearest tunnel entrance. “They’re hitting up all the talkers. Asking us about the new MO.”

“They hit you up, hottie?” Faith inquired, eyebrow up.

Thomas turned back, looking interested at Faith’s open-minded inquiry. “I’ve been… interviewed. Pretty much everybody who was in the bar and who was… on the not-immediately-fatal-to-humans list got their own talk show host.”

/Oh. Great./ “And?” Buffy asked, already in fight-or-flight.

Thomas shot her a toothy grin over his shoulder. “I’m gonna be real, Slayer. You have friends because of the new system… and you have enemies. A lot of the guys really like that they can walk around with their heads held high. A lot of ‘em don’t like that they have so many rules they have to play by. Like that idiot Ragat with his Tagash venom, you know? Some people don’t like change, and some people just can’t stomach working with you instead of against you.” He smirked, his cloven lip rippling. “Guess it’s against their religion. So it was probably a dice-roll. Who knows what they made of it.” He grinned broadly then, split lip spreading so that the overall velvet-gray color thinned even more to show the underlying saffron that lay beneath the first layer. “For the record… I talked you up.” Then, without another word he dropped down through the manhole, the lid clattering back into place behind him.

“Time for a big Scooby meeting, huh B?” Faith put in as Thomas disappeared.

“Yeah,” Buffy whispered, feeling a little like the world was caving in around her head.

Buffy would’ve called everyone to meet at the Magic Box… but since this involved Mom, it felt better to do it at home. Twenty minutes later, they were all assembled, draped over various portions of living room and waiting to hear the latest. 

“So. The interviews have begun,” Giles put in, nodding pensively. “That is… both good for us, and potentially alarming.”

Buffy bit her lip, keeping her eyes studiously away from Mom’s worried gaze. “So, how long do you think before they let us know they’re ‘officially’ in town? You know, before they contact you, and decide to start in on me?”

Giles sighed. “Soon, I’d imagine, now that their original plot has failed and they know you’ve been tipped off as to their presence.”

Spike didn’t beat around the bush. “And, what do you think we can expect from this wee visit, Watcher? Considerin’ the calling card was an assassination attempt.”

“Well…” Giles sat back. “Of course they made it sound as if they were coming to help us, that they had found some information that might assist us in fighting this Glory person. But considering what they’ve just done, I would imagine they would attempt to cover their original faux pas by coming in full of bluster.” His gaze met Buffy’s, stark. “They will try to overwhelm you, Buffy, to regain the upper hand. They will bully me about my green card, and use that to terrorize you as well. They will also no doubt attempt to put you through some sort of test or trial…”

“Like hell,” Spike spat, already growling.

Mom was right on his heels. “You have  _ got _ to be kidding me.”

“Nothing so intense as the Cruciamentum, of course,” Giles hastened to assure them.

Buffy put up a hand to forestall any further discussion on that front. “No. A wide world of no. Do they actually think I’ll jump through any of their stupid hoops, after what they did?”

“No doubt they think they can bully you into it, or at least blackmail you into thinking they hold all the cards, Buffy, since they have information we need to fight this creature.” Giles’ tones were bleak.

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Which part of ‘only two Slayers and a whole truckload of redundant support staff’ do they not understand?”

“Right?” Xander put in, nervous but totally on her side.

“The part where they have always considered the Slayer an appendage of the Council, rather than the other way around.”

“And ignorant,” Anya piped up, possibly unhelpfully. “Let’s not forget ignorant. Which, to be fair, you haven’t helped your case too much on that front, Buffy, with all your leaning on a team of witches and assorted human backups for the information front. You have kind of built your own little mini-Council here in Sunnydale, you know.”

Buffy opened her mouth, then shut it abruptly when the realization struck that, when you got right down to it… she kind of had. 

“You sure let them push you around like a little Council. I can’t get over sometimes how much you let them weigh in on your decisions. Even your personal ones, like who to sleep with; which, honestly, just never really made any sense to me at all.”

Buffy stared at Anya, floored. “What are you…”

“Maybe it’s even instinctive. Instinctive for humans, when confronted with the Slayer, to attempt to control her; and instinctive for the Slayer to permit humans to form a hierarchy around her to help her control her energy. At least, early on, when she’s younger and has a tougher time keeping rails on it.” A thoughtful expression crossed her face then, and she leaned forward as if studying Buffy, seated her chin in her hand and her elbow on her knee, to narrow her eye. “I could see it as a holdover from the demonic inheritance, since it’s such a similar power-structure to that required to keep a fledgling vampire in line…”

“Anya!” Giles barked, and he sounded highly alarmed now.

Anya went on as if she hadn’t heard the interruption. “By the time she’s old enough to understand her own limits and to gain some self-control, most Slayers are usually either fully accepting of the brainwashing, or they’ve already died.” 

“Ahn, honey, what…”

Anya was on a roll now, though, and looked frankly fascinated by her own ruminations. “Honestly, it makes a lot of sense. The Watcher is a stand-in for a sire. They swoop in immediately after a Slayer is Called, if not before, when they’re still Potentials. They put firm limits on the Slayer to make sure they are controlled, and they reinforce a message that separates the newly-Called from all others; isolates them, tells them, ‘I’m the only one who loves you’—which is kind of abusive, actually—but accomplishes a similar task to the sire-bond and passes on the message, ‘you can’t leave me, you have no one else who understands you, you need me’. It’s a control mechanism, if an unconscious one. They become a stern father figure and a guide to a girl adrift in a frightening new life. Of course she’ll agree to everything he says. And the wider Council would function as the larger nest.”

“Anya!” Giles snapped again, sounding horrified.

“Oh, I don’t mean you, Giles, of course,” she put in, waving him off easily. “You didn’t catch Buffy before she was Called. No one did. She lucked out. She formed her little band of mini-council followers here while still maintaining outside contacts and an external life. It’s no doubt the reason she’s able even to consider shaking the programming now.”

Buffy was whirling as she stared at the ex-vengeance demon. The floor had fallen out from under her. She had no idea where to stand.

“You really think…” Willow began, then shook her head. “We’ve never tried to… to  _ control _ Buffy! We’re her  _ friends! _ All we’ve ever tried to do is to help…”

Spike snorted with loud, fierce derision, earning himself a shocked glare from ‘Red’.

Tara, though, was on a whole other tack. “You really think that… That what the Watchers always do with the Slayers is… Is like  _ that _ , Anya? Because if… If…” She pulled in a deep breath, like she was fortifying herself, then pushed on. “Have you or… you know… any of your friends… ever…”

Anya waved her hand again. “No. It’s one thing to intervene on the behalf of humans who are being victimized. It’s an entirely other matter when you get into species dynamics. I mean, I’m squicked by it, so I ranted about it a few times to Hoffy, but he told me in no uncertain terms that we were hands off the whole thing. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times, ‘There are some people we just don’t want to piss off, Anyanka, and if you mess with that business, you’ll be irritating the Powers and our lot all in the same day. I don’t need the headache’.”

Xander looked like his eyes were going to bug out of his skull. “‘Our lot’?”

“Yeah. The Gods of Chaos. Who did you  _ think _ I worked for, Xander? JC Penney?”

Buffy barely heard this last little bit. Her stunned brain has wandered off on a whole other tack. /Species dynamics./

/I’m a… species./

Buffy had… known that, after a fashion, after the all-too-animated conversations she had had with Anya post-Dracula. The other woman had, after all, had a pretty unique concept of ‘girl-talk’, and had wanted to know everything Buffy could tell her about the claim, the link between herself and Spike, et cetera. Most of the interrogation had been unsettlingly x-rated, to the point where Buffy had gone from uncomfortable to fascinated and eventually went right out the other side to secretly, reluctantly gleeful right along with Anya, because if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right? 

The information the ex-demon had given Buffy in return had been invaluable when it came to keeping the peace, and generally living her best life with her vampire, but, somehow, this whole Watcher-and-Council-acts-like-a-surrogate-nest part of the business had never come up.

Buffy kind of felt like she might vomit.

“Well,” Faith put in dryly into the resounding silence, “color me happy that I didn’t get picked up till after, either. Yay for being a runaway. I mean, I was probably ripe for the plucking, I was so in love with my Watcher, just for, you know, listening and giving me a home and shit.”

Buffy had her eyes on Giles, wondering if any of this was part of the Council’s teachings on Slayer management or anything. Giles had his ‘set’ face on, though, and looked tight and angry. “You may say what you like, Anya, but there is no proof whatsoever that the demonic essence used to animate the First Slayer was in any way related to, or resembling in its habits or requirements, that of the vampire…”

Anya actually rolled her eyes. “Oh, because if you’re being hunted to death by some monster that’s either eating all your people or turning them into more monsters, you’re not going to use its ability to turn you into monsters to turn one of your dependent exogamous captive adoptees into the same kind of monster, but backward, so it can be kept in your control and you can use it to fight back. You wouldn’t use the demonic essence of a Ferava or an Ano-Movic or a Gavrokh to fight vampires! They wouldn’t sense them, for one, and would have no species-specific reason to fight them. But something that is created from the vampire, but inverted; fights for the same territory, the same food-source, but to protect it, uses the same senses… A Slayer’s blood wouldn’t heal a vampire if they weren’t related, and it sure the hell wouldn’t be an aphrodisiac to them. They damn sure wouldn’t be able to perform mate-bites. And do you think a Slayer would sense vampires above all other demons, without training, without meditation, if she wasn’t part vamp?” Anya shook her head in disgust. “Why are you lying to these girls, Giles? Or, I guess, why are you lying to yourself?” 

Pushing herself to her feet as if too irritated to remain, she headed for the kitchen. “With this Council of yours coming, the last thing Buffy and Faith need on their side is someone unwilling to face the truth.” Then, turning to Mom, she shrugged. “Joyce, I’m going to go make some coffee. I think it’s going to be a long night.”

“Yes, sure, fine,” Mom answered, sounding floored. “Rupert…”

Giles was pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers by now. “I honestly don’t know, Joyce. I never…”

Buffy was prickling all over. It would explain so much. So much about why the draw to Angel, and to Spike; to all vampires, but especially to these older ones; old enough to come close to matching the ancient yearning of the singular captive inside of her. And, it would explain so much about why the Council hated the girls they used, why they fought so hard to keep them ignorant and control them…

/And why I can’t let them tie me down anymore. Why I can’t let them do it to any other girl./

Which meant staying alive, and staying on top, so it didn’t start over again. /I have to change the system  _ now _ , so that next time…/ “We need to do this right,” she spoke up, breaking into the stunned silence. “Look. They’re gonna come here. They’re gonna give the third degree to every one of you. You’re all my…” Buffy waved a hand in the air, purpose filling her with strength. “My ‘known associates’. So we all have to have a solid front, and a plan for how to deal with them.”

“Well, I mean… we do, kinda, right, Buffy?” Wil put in, looking a little confused. “Defensive magicks, now we know for sure they’re coming in guns blazing. And… the whole thing with Xan and Anya doing their ‘let’s talk about sex’ routine…”

“Ugh,” Xander broke in. “I was kinda hoping everyone maybe forgot about that by now.”

“Buck up, Xander,” Anya called blithely from the kitchen. “We have to do our part.”

“Yeah, but why is our part embarrassing, instead of all cool stuff, like zapping people with spells?”

“Because your secret superpower is babble?” Jonathan suggested, smiling slightly.

“Okay, look. Just because you live with me, doesn’t mean you get to take potshots. I pay the electric bill.”

“Touche.”

“What’ll you be doing while we’re all getting ready to run interference, Mr. Giles?” Tara asked, sounding mildly worried for pretty much all of them.

“I,” Giles answered, no longer quite as shaken as he was moments ago, “shall be working to prepare our defense against the standard tactics employed by the personnel—and the personalities—I surmise will be present.” For the first time since Anya had leveled her accusation, his eyes lit on Buffy’s; and they were in no way the eyes of someone who had ever tried to control her. He had only ever tried to be there for her. “We have a certain level of intrigue to maintain during this fiasco of a meeting; and an agenda, of course.”

/If Anya’s right… then man, I lucked out in the Watcher department./ “Get the 411 on Glory,” Buffy agreed grimly, aloud.

“While giving nothing away, yes.”

“And keeping everything and everyone here in Sunnydale intact,” Buffy finished flatly. No ground would be ceded on that count. Not one inch. 

Her eyes flickered back to Giles’. “And they can never know…” She trailed off, fighting not to bite her lip, and long before Spike could rumble his warning at her.

Giles shook his head once, sharply, and removed his glasses once more. “At our last meeting they informed me that they had no idea as to the current whereabouts of the Key. This would rather indicate they are in no way aware that… That it’s currently safe and its whereabouts known.”

“Wait… what?” Faith exclaimed, incredulous. “You’ve got this key thing, B?”

“Bloody hell, Watcher,” Spike growled, amazed.

Buffy was right there with him. /Oh, nice going, Giles./ Maybe he shouldn’t be in charge of putting off the Council after all.

Willow was staring as well… right before she rounded on Buffy. “When were you gonna tell us all that, Buffy? And, uh, where’re you hiding it? When did you find it? What is it? What does it look like? I bet it’s incredibly powerful! I bet we could use the emanations from it to…”

Buffy flung up her hand for the second time tonight; this time to ward off all the witchly excitement. “It was… a recent discovery.” She would’ve felt bad about Willow’s clear betrayed sensibilities, much less Faith’s clear and visible expression, which was showing one of those hurt, ‘yeah, sure, don’t trust me with anything big’ kind of looks… but she didn’t have time right now as she rounded on Giles. “It’s… been tough figuring out how to keep it in one place and secure, and we still don’t have much of a plan for that,  _ right _ , Giles?” 

“Oh. Yes. Right. It’s, ah… rather unwieldy and, in fact, an entirely unexpected, ah… manifestation, and thus…”

He was just digging them in deeper. “Anyway, the last thing we really need is these Council jerks coming in to stick their noses into it. We don’t need more people knowing about it; more people Glory can torture into telling her what… where it is. So…” She sighed heavily, changing tacks with an effort. “God, you’d think if they actually wanted to help, the Council would’ve just given us a call to drop the 411, not come in to try to wipe us out.”

Giles’ expression went all dry and British. “Well, considering they have only just found out that, ah, your agenda is no longer the same as theirs…”

Buffy huffed. “Oh, you mean, save the world by killing demons, easy-peasy, don’t ask questions?”

“Well, ah… yes.” A slight pause. “I’m sure you’ll be very glad to hear that Quentin Travers will no doubt be heading up the delegation…”

“Oh. Joy. The King of the Cruciamentum.” Buffy laid a palm on Spike’s vibrating thigh, risked a glance at her mother. “Mr. ‘Send In the Wetworks’, I’m guessing. Probably to get both of us, next…” She shot a short, warning glance over at her sister-Slayer. “And maybe Faith too, now she’s shown herself to be on our side…”

Faith made a deep, vicious noise that seemed to rise up from her gut. Mom, who had hung back, mostly silent, for a lot of the conversation before now, stood up very slowly. “When you get these… men… in a room, Buffy, I’m going to be there.”

Giles made a choked noise.

Mom swung on him before either Buffy or her Watcher could speak.  _ “No _ , Rupert. I am  _ going _ to be in there. If these men honestly think they can come after my daughter like this— _ again _ —after putting her through God knows what kind of insanity—I still can’t believe that…  _ thing _ that happened in that house was something they did on  _ purpose! _ —and who on Earth sends armed mercenaries after teenage girls? And they don’t even  _ pay _ them, when they risk their lives every day, they don’t get medical benefits, vacation time…” She swung back around, hard. “Buffy, when have you ever had a day off?”

Buffy blinked at her mother, nonplussed. “Well, there was the thing with the telepathy I couldn’t control. And the fever, where I saw the demon killing the kids in the hospital. And… when I stayed with Spike in the motel last year… Though, with that, I mean, I did stay away too long…”

“Pet.”

Buffy stilled… and fought not to flinch at the expanding look of sheer outrage on her mother’s face. 

“I’m not talking about  _ sick days _ , Buffy,” Mom answered, enunciating very slowly and clearly. Buffy had never seen her mother in such a cold rage before. “I’m talking about actual  _ time off. _ Where you get to leave this town and be a young woman who doesn’t have to work, or  _ worry _ about work…”

Spike snorted heavily. “She  _ always _ bleedin’ worries, Joyce. Sometimes she can’t sleep for it. Isn’t like there’s been an alternate about.”

Willow broke in then, sounding pained. “Yeah, even when she was in the hospital that time, she got up when she had that fever and fought  _ der kindestod _ demon, even though she was all hallucinate-y…” She cut off abruptly and shrank back when Mom whirled to glare at her in clear horror. 

When Mom swung back on Buffy, she could only sort of shrug a little. “He was hurting the kids,” she whispered. “It was the same one who killed cousin Celia, so I couldn’t just…”

Mom flinched. “You could see them… the demons… even back then? That young?”

Buffy sighed and looked away. “Only when I had a bad fever, I guess?”

Mom abruptly buried her face in her hands. “I can’t... This…” And her head was up again and she was rounding on Faith. “Did  _ you _ see them that young?”

Faith had had her eyes on Buffy, a strange look on her face as if she had just realized something she’d never considered. At this, she jerked her gaze away to meet Mom’s, and she shrugged, glanced away, down at the floor. “Yeah, you know. I, uh… saw a few things.” Looking uncomfortable as Buffy had ever seen her, she pulled a cigarette out from behind her ear where she’d stowed it, began fiddling with it like she was desperate for something to look at. “Once when I was locked outside for the night in the middle of winter ‘cause Mom was on a bender and I pissed her off somehow, and she wanted time alone with the loser she was bangin’, I got real damn cold—probably hypothermia or some shit—and saw somethin’ goin’ down the street near me. It looked at me, and for a sec I thought I was gonna die…” She shrugged, eyes still on her cigarette. “It kept goin’, and I lived. Thinkin’ back now, I’m betting it was a Gorakh. Looked about right. Green, long, tall, yadda.” Another shrug, and seemingly recovered, she lifted the white tube, shoved it back behind her ear, leaned back against the couch where she sat on the arm, lazily self-possessed once more.

Buffy stared at her, utterly floored by this blasé recounting of what sounded like just another night in what was apparently a truly awful childhood. God, no wonder Faith thought a motel was great digs and never took anything for granted. Her welcome, a roof over her head, people giving a shit about her; anything. /Damn, damn, damn./ Buffy had only ever heard about people treating their kids like that in newspaper stories.

She’d grown up in Boston, right? It got seriously cold there, didn’t it?

Mom remained terrifyingly silent for a long moment, then turned to Giles, expression hard, firm, just this short of a glare. “Let me get this straight. These girls have been plagued and tormented by being different since they were pre-teens. At least since puberty. For some of them, it ruined school, home-life, God knows what else. And then… these men come in and, instead of making it better for them, they make it  _ worse?” _

Giles opened his mouth… and promptly closed it.

Mom shook her head, expression steely. “This stops. It ends here. I’m at this meeting. And I’ll be  _ damned _ if any  _ one _ of them hurts either  _ one _ of these girls  _ ever _ again.”

Buffy opened her mouth, terrified of what would happen if the Council decided that her mother, like her lover, was an enemy. “Mom, if they think you’re… in their way…”

“Oh, Buffy,” Mom interrupted grimly, “they have never even  _ heard _ of a roadblock like Joyce Summers.” And she smiled; a smile that chilled her daughter to the bone. “We are going to  _ destroy _ them.”

Buffy stared, half-horrified, half-amazed. “We still need them for a few things,” she reminded her mother worriedly.

“Then they can tell us what they are from their knees.”

“Damn, B! I  _ like _ this woman!”

“I mean…” Tara agreed, “don’t take this the wrong way, Mrs. Summers, but you’re kind of… hot. Mom-hot, but hot.”

“Tara!”

“Oh, c’mon. Tell me you didn’t feel that wave of power rocket through the room!”

“Bloody hell; _ I _ felt it! Buffy, you mind if I write a poem about your mother tonight?”

Anya, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, lifted her eyes from her nails. “You ever get bored with curating art, Joyce, Hoffy might want to offer you a job.”

“Oh, dear bloody Lord,” Giles murmured, and lowered his head into his arms on the coffee table.

***

“Mom, you really don’t need to…”

“Buffy…” Mom lifted a hand, where she stood off to one side of the dining area. Her expression was bleak. “I used to have bad dreams about monsters, when I was younger. And I… I ran away for a while, when I was sixteen, with a van full of hippies. My mom, your grandmother, was so angry at me. But I was so confused…” She shook her head, the regret lining her face making her look far older than she ever had before, to Buffy’s eyes. “If I’ve been hard on you, it’s because I’ve been so  _ afraid _ for you. That you were repeating my mistakes. That…” She looked down, remorse and agony showing in every line of her body. “I'm so  _ sorry _ , Buffy, that I let Dad talk me into putting you into that place. I thought... you had to be imagining it, just like I was. That it would pass, if I just got you the help you needed. That maybe it was even my fault, like he said it was.” And piercing hazel eyes met hers, liquid with sorrow. “But not because I was 'permissive'. That maybe I passed some kind of gene down to you; something that made you prone to psychosis, or..." 

/Oh, man… You… You really were a Potential, Mom, weren’t you./ The very concept was enough to floor Buffy completely. That so much of their interpersonal history might have been a simple product of her mother’s own trauma over Slayer dreams and imagery and urges for which she had never received any explanation, only to see the same terrifying, inexplicable symptoms paraded before her eyes in her own daughter. 

"But it wasn't that, was it?” Mom whispered. “I gave you some kind of susceptibility toward being a Slayer, or something, didn't I?"

“Mom…”

“I thought I’d made you crazy. That if I was just tough enough on you…” Her hand reached out, lifted to cup Buffy’s face. “I’m going to make it up to you, baby. I will be there, one-hundred percent. These men who’ve used you, and terrorized you…” Her tones turned ferocious, set. “I will  _ end _ them if they hurt you even once more.” And then a faint, hurt little smile touched her mother’s lips. “Then maybe I can sleep at night, knowing how much I hurt you, too.”

“Mom…”

And then she was in Mom’s arms, and Mom was clinging as hard to her as she was clinging back. “It’s okay, Buffy, right?”

Fingers digging into her mother’s blouse, fighting not to tear the linen-blend, she sighed against the pending tears, and nodded into Mom-smell, the rising tide of love and relief. “It’s okay.”

***

“Are we sure we want to do this?”

“Let’s just get it soddin’ over with, pet. Strike the first blow. Choose our ground an’ that lot.”

“Right.” Nodding, Buffy glanced over at Faith. “You ready?”

Faith nodded back without meeting her eyes, and shifted the stake a little in her hand. “Let’s do this, B. I’m starving.”

“Alright.” Stepping out of the car, Buffy led their power-pyramid into Willy’s.

All the more dangerous demons had seemingly made their excuses and departed or been ushered out. The place was dead, or at least pretty underpopulated. There were only a few inoffensive sorts around, and they were surrounded. 

There were three obvious Council representatives in the bar when they entered; two harassing folks up at the bar itself—one getting right into Thomas’ face and one exchanging monies with Gadrak while looking all offended at having to discuss anything with a Tud’rihkaan—and one over in one of the booths, deep in conversation with Tuki. The one-eyed gambler didn’t look pleased to be there. Her tentacles were waving around all agitatedly like she was sure she was about to get them cut off. Which was understandable, because Povigast were not really automatically on the ‘protected’ list most times. 

Not that Tud’rihkaan were, either. Really, the only one of the three who was pretty safe was Thomas. Which… why would anyone be so belligerent with a Ferava? They were mostly inoffensive; like, giant koala, much? Not that Buffy thought you should go out of your way to piss one off, either. They were clearly able to defend themselves if necessary, with the Cuisinarts they had on their hands; and, like… this guy didn’t know Thomas from Adam. What if he had a pup in his pouch and was feeling hormonal or protective or…

This was bad. These guys were gonna mess up her town so bad. They were throwing everything off. “Hey. Attention all Councilmembers.”

The room froze. The three tweed-wearers swiveled away from their regularly-scheduled harassment to stare at the Slayer-and-vampire convention by the door.

Two of them paled. 

One of them immediately looked absolutely disgusted by what he saw. 

Buffy ignored them all to shoot a glance at Thomas. “You okay?”

Thomas unraveled his long frame from his stool. “Yeah. Fine, Slayer. Thanks. I’ll just… take my drink and go find another seat, huh?”

“Maybe go smoke, Thomas. This might get unpleasant.”

“Sure.” With a nod, Thomas excused himself to head for the back door.

She turned her attention to Tuki. “You can go too. Don’t let this guy keep you.”

Looking grateful, Tuki promptly and swiftly slithered out of her booth, flowing like water. Disgusted-guy glared daggers from his seat as the creature passed them, slapping Spike a quick, slightly-moist, gecko-like hi-five en route to the door.

“See you at the game later,” Spike informed her. Tuki nodded as she vanished into the foyer.

Buffy turned her attention back to where Gadrak was being paid off. “Did you volunteer, Gadrak, or were you forced?”

Gadrak sighed. “Wasn’t my idea, Slayer. Tried to play both sides for a long time, but when they showed…”

Buffy nodded. “Good enough. Get out.”

Gadrak looked relieved. “Thanks. Seriously. I didn’t want…”

“Go now, Gadrak, before I get annoyed.”

“Sorry. Yeah. I’m gone. I’m already mist. You don’t even see me…” Turning pale and chameleon-like, the odd creature sidled, flexible spine-projections and all, toward the back entrance, blending into the walls as he did so.

Raising her voice, Buffy nodded pleasantly at the three remaining patrons of interest. “Gentlemen. Please tell Quentin that if he actually wants to know, from the source, how things stand in Sunnydale, he can do the polite thing and come ask me. We’ll be waiting for him—and, apparently, all of you—in my Watcher’s front, downtown, in one hour. Me, Faith, and my town’s Master vampire, who is my vassal and my ally. As I’m sure you already know, Giles’ place of business is called ‘The Magic Box’.” She smiled sweetly and impartially at all three men, and twiddled her fingers at them in a little farewell. “Toodaloo, boys.”

Turning on her heel, she led the way back out the door, Spike and Faith in her wake.

And stood just outside to lean back against the wall, trying not to hyperventilate. 

Spike lightly kissed the top of her head, then immediately lit up a cigarette, like a victory dance. “Now that’s what I call throwing down the bloody gauntlet.” And he passed the first cigarette to Faith and sparked up another for himself.

Faith took it, drew in a drag, and leaned back against the wall next to Buffy, one boot planted on the aging stucco. “Fuck,” she whispered, then flicked away some ash and glanced over at Buffy. “Well, I guess it’s on now.”

“Yeah,” Buffy answered grimly. “It’s definitely on.”

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Are we ready for Checkpoint revisited?  
Rewriting that with an altered power dynamic was a LOT of fun.


	30. Chapter 30

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kind of long, because so much to slam in here, between additions due to rewriting the thing, plus dialogue from "Checkpoint", but hopefully it's still fun.  
> Thanks as ever to wolf_shadoe for being amazing!

“I really still cannot believe you just… challenged them like that. Just told them to come in and… That you’d be waiting for them here. That you invited them to… To simply…” Giles was dithering as he polished and re-polished his glasses for the nth time.

Buffy glanced up at her audience, carefully arrayed above on the weird little area with the ladder where Giles stashed his private, not-for-sale library of help-the-Slayer reference books. They had everyone up there tonight; even that kid Andrew. “I want to get it over with. I’m tired of pussyfooting around, waiting for them to spring something on us while they dig around looking for dirt.” She shrugged as she pushed herself up onto the research table and crossed her legs at the ankle, then, leaning back on one hand, made a grab for the back of Spike’s duster and dragged him close so that he could plant his butt against said table at her left side, where he belonged. 

Weirdly, he resisted for a moment, too busy glowering at the door like some kind of irritable watchdog. “And, honestly? The other night was enough. I really can’t handle almost being killed right now…” Another tug, and Spike finally came, crossing his arms and looking tense. Buffy freed up a hand to rub him briskly between the shoulder blades. “I bet Faith can’t either…”

Standing off to one side, leaning with one shoulder against a nearby pillar, Faith made an unimpressed sort of noise. Her eyes, too, remained focused on the door. There was something going on there--something bothering her sister-Slayer--but as of right now, Faith wasn’t talking.

Well, problem for another time, maybe. “...And I know if anyone even  _ touches _ Spike again, I’ll kill ‘em,” Buffy wrapped up.

Spike shrugged off her attempts at calming him. He was like a rock. “Leave off, Slayer. I’m not a soddin’ cat.”

Buffy womanfully refrained from listing off the many ways in which she could, and had, made him purr on many an occasion. She merely dropped her hand back to the table behind her and leaned back again to kick her legs out in front of her, as impatient and as frustrated as her mate was. Probably they were feeding off of each other. It was the downside of feelings-sharing. “They’re gonna screw everything up,” she complained (truth be told, whined a little, but  _ damn _ them, anyway). “Everything we’ve worked so hard to build. And Da…” She bit off the words, chopping off the slip before she could say too much, shook her head. Maybe only Giles and Spike had heard it. “Dammit, I don’t need the Council looking over my shoulder, much less threatening me, when we don’t even know what we’re dealing with.”

Giles made a twisted sort of face. “Well, to be fair, that’s precisely why we need to talk to them.”

“They do have  _ phones _ in England, though, right?” Xander put in from above, which, he had a point. “I mean, it isn’t just like, bangers and mash and tea and telly, but no phones…”

“Oh, Xander, do be quiet until the prattle actually becomes necessar…”

The doorbell jangled. Everyone jumped. Buffy tensed still further, holding her breath but ready to leap to the offensive—or dive in front of Spike if need be—and sagged in relief when she saw her mother’s face, Dawn at her back. “Sorry I’m late. Closing took too long…”

“I told you I should have stayed to help,” Anya called down from above, terse and frustrated.

“We needed you here in case they showed early or tried anything,” Willow answered, tense as Buffy had ever heard her.

“No, it’s fine, Anya. Baby, go on. Go into the back and get situated. Get started on your homework…”

Dawn stared, looking amazed. “You’re  _ kidding _ me! You brought me all the way down here, and now you’re gonna tell me I don’t get to watch the show? No way I’m gonna…”

“Dawn.  _ Go.” _ Buffy’s tone brooked no disobedience. Dawn had to be here because Mom was here and she wasn’t going to let her sister sit home alone and get into god alone knew what kind of trouble, or be found by Glory while they were all here, but that didn’t mean they were going to let the Council get even a sniff of her presence. 

Mom had agreed to bring her, despite probably wondering just what drugs her eldest was on these days when Buffy had insisted, distracted and anxious,  _ “Mom, they come at me through my family! That’s what the warning said! Now, till I know it’s safe, I’m not leaving  _ either _ of you alone;  _ ever! _ Bring her! Please!” _

As if reading the strain her daughter was under, Mom hadn’t argued anymore. And Dawn was here. But she didn’t need to be up front and center for the show. 

Not that she was going to go without a fight. “Oh, like I’m just gonna…”

“Bit…” Spike snapped, at the end of what was, right now, an exceedingly short tether.

Dawn shot him a glare seething with betrayal.

Mom sighed heavily. “We’ve already been over this, Dawn. Back room. Now.”

Dawn knew when she was beat. “Man, I miss everything cool. I don’t even get to see you guys tell all the tweedy old jerks to go to hell…”

“And watch your mouth, young lady!”

“Oh, as if Buffy didn’t say worse at my age, Mom! Jeez!” Still grumbling, Dawn grasped her shoulder-bag tightly in two fists and marched toward the back hall with her head lowered like a battering ram, eyes burning with suppressed fury.

Mom made a face, watching her as she vanished through the rear door. “I hate this. Is there really something out there maybe coming after us, Buffy, because…”

“There is,” Buffy bit off, stark and afraid and hating it. No use lying to Mom anymore; or at least, no more than was necessary to keep her safe from Glory-interrogations. 

Mom’s eyes darted to Buffy’s; locked there. Flickered to Giles’. “And we have to deal with these…  _ men.” _ The word sounded like a cruel epithet on her lips.

Giles sighed. “If the Council knows something about Glory—her agenda or her origins—then…” He sighed heavily, and the glasses came off once more. “I hate to say it, but we will likely have to cooperate at least somewhat. In the least, maybe it will help us to get a grip on what we’re dealing with. Right now, I think we’re…” His eyes found Buffy’s as well, looking much more defenseless than usual without the spectacles. “We’re a bit lost.”

“I’m not bowing to them, Giles.” Buffy’s tones were stark. “They might  _ think _ they have the upper hand, but they only have two Slayers, and we’re  _ both _ here. Strength in numbers. The only way they get a fresh start is to get a new one; and I don’t know about Faith, but I don’t plan on dying anytime soon.” Buffy smiled grimly and laid a brief hand on Spike’s shoulder when he set up a low, almost subsonic growl at the very thought. “Not that me dying would really help them with that whole deal, probably...”

“Not in my game plan either, B,” Faith agreed, sounding sour and more than a little pissed off. “Not gonna let these bastards pull a divide-and-conquer just when we’ve started to get our shit together.” Shifting a little, she resettled her shoulder against her pillar and set her expression to ‘disobedient and proud of it’. 

Buffy had once admired the hell out of that expression. She had since learned to despise it.

Now she was trying to figure out how to copy it, or at least do her own version.

“Unfortunately, they do have a few aces in their sleeves, as it were, when it comes to pushing us about,” Giles answered, sounding like he was already worn out before the debate had even begun.

Buffy bit her lip, fighting down the shaken thing inside her. Because even just the thought... “Can they really do the stuff you said? Kick you out the country?”

Giles looked away, removed his glasses, got to polishing. “In a heartbeat.” The polishing took on a particularly vicious note. “See, with the rough stuff, they're all right out there. A bit ham-handed, but they get it done. But, ah... that sort of thing? The, ah, bureaucracy, the pulling of political strings…” He paused briefly, and his face tightened till all the lines around his eyes showed in sharp relief. “They're the best in the world. They can kill you with the stroke of a pen.” His knuckles went white. “Poncy sods.”

Spike chuckled tightly. “Tell us how you really feel, there, mate.”

There was a little  _ pop _ . Giles jumped and glanced down at his hand, opened it. The handkerchief fell aside to reveal a lens, which had been punched out of the frame of his glasses due to such vigorous cleaning. Muttering to himself, Giles popped it back in and set to polishing the fingerprints off of it, the words drifting off of him like chewed bullets. “Hostage… Gun pointed… My green card… Humiliating. Likely come after my business as well…”

Buffy touched his tense shoulder. “They’re smart. They know I can’t lose you.”

Giles stilled. “Thank you,” he answered softly, and moved to replace his glasses on his nose.

“It’s not going to happen,” Mom put in, flatly confident. 

Giles made a twisted sort of face. “I’m really not certain that your idea is all that much better, Joyce. It’s rather a sort of ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’ prospect; or, rather, selling your soul to the devil to escape the Nazis, perhaps. Not that I’m equating my former compatriots to Nazis…”

“I might be,” Buffy put in blandly, weighing it.

Spike grunted dismissively. “We can hire my git of a grandsire to get us out of it later on. It’ll make him feel all important and righteous. Everyone wins.”

Faith barked a laugh. “Yeah, he’d get off on it, for sure.” She poked Spike in the belly with one elbow. “Especially the part where he could dash in to save Buffy, and you’d be all indebted to him.”

Spike grunted again, sourly, but didn’t answer.

Buffy pulled a face of her own. “He can make it my wedding present.” Not that it would be a good one, all reluctant and weird and full of mixed motives and kind of weighted… but she’d take it, after this.

Spike’s boots shifted, uncomfortable with the thought. Buffy tried to shake out her shoulders and failed miserably. They all stood around for a minute or two, silent. Faith took a turn at shifting, darted a glance at her, then at Giles, frowned a little.

Buffy had had enough. “What?”

Faith looked away. “I dunno. It’s just… Do you think what vengeance girl said is right, B?”

“Of course I’m right,” Anya called, immediately, from her perch above. “Which thing?”

Buffy ignored her to study Faith curiously. She had seldom seen her fellow Slayer look so disturbed. “What’s up, Faith?”

It was clear when Faith was sitting on something for a moment, trying to decide whether to just swallow it or let it out. Finally it got away from her, despite her best efforts. “Do you think we really are like fledges when we start out?” Her eyes glanced off of Spike, away again. “Like, do you think we really need Watchers, like they need a sire, or we go a little nuts, get all out of control? Do you think that’s why I went a little crazy, with the whole might-makes-right thing?”

Buffy sighed, and looked down into her crossed arms for a second, aware she had a very intent vampire drilling holes into the back of her head with his eyes. “I probably don’t have to answer that, Faith. We were both there. Want, take, have, is definitely something I’ve experienced from the other side, too.” At her back, Spike grunted, sounding if anything amused. Rather than acknowledging what she felt from him, she instead lifted her eyes to meet her sister-Slayer’s head-on. “But that still doesn’t mean we have to bow to the Council. It’s not about not having a Watcher. We can still have those, if they're willing to actually work with us. It’s about having full disclosure about what we are and what we need, you know? ‘Cause they’ve gotten a little out of control too; and way drunk on power. They need to be reined in just as much as any Slayer.”

Faith nodded slowly, her eyes never leaving Buffy’s. Buffy thought she read relief there. “Yeah. Yeah, for sure. We can definitely make that happen without completely flying blind, totally on our own, right?”

“Totally.” /Oh, man, Faith./ She should’ve guessed how much this would scare her sister, who had long since gone down the road of denial, passed the point of no return, and come out the other side of rebellion. And she had never had a Cruciamentum, had never had the experiences Buffy had had, to learn to utterly distrust the Council. She had loved her first watcher the way Buffy loved Giles, lost her… And she had long since accepted that she needed controls. To join in on something like this--to agree to tell the only people who might be able to stop her if she ever went off-track again that she didn’t need them--would be terrifying. /That’s not what we’re doing, Faith./ But man. Buffy had never fully realized just how much she was asking of her sister-Slayer, here… and never fully recognized how much Faith was tendering without question. 

There was a drawn-out silence, eventually broken by a voice from on high. “You said an hour, right Buffy?” Willow called from the bookshelf-thing, her voice a little strained. “We can’t hold this forever without a target.”

“I did,” Buffy answered tightly. “Of course, who knows if they’ll bite.”

“Oh, they’ll bite,” Giles put in. “They’re too terrified of what you’re doing here, and of your relationship with Spike, not to.”

/Obviously, since they already sent the wetworks guys to cancel him./ She had started to question everything by now. /After today, they’ll probably send ‘em after me, if this doesn’t work. An uppity Slayer is a dead Slayer, and the only good Slayer is a… what did Spike call it? A biddable one. One they can manipulate./ 

It hit her then. /It's kind of amazing I lived as long as I did after my Cruciamentum, isn’t it? After Angel, and all that? That I got away with going to college and everything. Probably only because Faith, their main girl as far as the Line goes, was in a coma, so they were stuck with me./

But now she had lived long enough to throw the Council for a loop all over again. Which honestly begged the question; exactly how much interference Giles had run for her and her vampire in the last year or so? /Probably tons. Probably we’ll never remotely know. ‘Cause otherwise, they’d have sent their goons out like  _ months _ ago, once the rumors really kicked off, right. Angel all over again, but with the slayer of Slayers? Definitely by the time Faith was in play again!/

Giles had to have been doctoring reports like crazy to keep these guys in the dark.

Well, she supposed it had given him something to do. Spike would probably say it had kept him ‘out of the bottle’, to have a function, even if it was at the expense of more than a few new gray hairs. But it really put it into perspective, didn’t it, how much her Watcher loved her, and the sheer faith he had in her, that he had bought her freedom from Council harassment for almost a year before this all went down. Even as he’d no doubt questioned his own judgment, after everything with Angel; at least at first. He’d just put it all on the trust they’d built between them since; his trust in her. /Which… God. That he did that, when I was dating William the Bloody…/ Though, to be fair, he’d had a taste of chipped Spike when he’d lived with him, so maybe…

No. That had been a big leap for Giles, from ‘neutered vamp in my living room’ to ‘dating my Slayer’ in a three-day turnaround. 

Totally a leap of faith. And he’d taken it, for her, thrown himself wholeheartedly into the fray when faced with the choice to out her to his erstwhile compatriots or no.

Because, she knew, the last time he had had the choice to side with the Council or with her, he had chosen wrong, and she had ended up in a haunted house, fighting off Zachary Kralik with nothing but her wits and a glass of holy water, while her mother screamed behind her, tied to a chair.

This, then, had been Rupert Giles’ reparation. /And, God, I will so take it./ 

/And now I’m strong enough to terrify them. I’ve become everything they feared. And all I have to convince them not to kill me is that they need me to fight Glory before they off me. They’ll probably still try to do away with me afterward. God, is Spike right? Will we be on the run forever after this unless I somehow manage to, what’s the word, cow them totally today?/

/I’m going to have to figure out some kind of permanent fix for this someday, aren’t I?/

Not something she could manage today. Today was for getting through the current moment alive and with all her people intact. Tomorrow…

They’d deal with tomorrow when the sun rose.

She had to admit she felt tons better when Mom moved to array herself between Buffy and Giles, then swung around to face the door. Which was good, since directly in her wake, the bell rang again.

This time, it was no false alarm.

The way they streamed in made it clear they were trying to be impressive, overbearing, overwhelming. They spread out immediately as soon as they moved through the door; a tweed flood flanked by two wetworks dudes. 

Two up front meant that wetworks dude number three was stationed at the back to cut off escape. /Nice white-flag effort, you assholes./ 

They fanned out, striding like they owned the place; eyes darting everywhere. Taking things in, scanning, occasionally picking up, studying, and setting down artifacts from the shop; impassive and judgmental. All except for Quentin Travers, of course, who took point to stalk straight up to Giles and Buffy, eyes glittering. 

As he approached them, the two wetworks jerks moved to flank him, each holding up the requisite crossbow, trained on Spike. They were locked and loaded. It made Buffy exceedingly nervous. What if one of them got itchy trigger-fingers? Not that she didn’t have a whole coven of witches at her back up there, ready to wave their hands and waft the bolts aside, or put a shield of protection around them, or some damn thing—Buffy had no idea what they had in mind—but still. She didn’t have to like it.

Just on sheer, primitive principle, the sight of anything pointy and wooden aimed at her guy’s heart gave her the wig in a major way, and she started to feel that  _ feeling _ inside her mind; that  _ thing _ that threatened to shut down her ability to have a coherent conversation in words that resembled English. The part that would want to complete this conversation by neatly disassembling every one of these men—and the two women they’d brought—without fanfare. 

Her gaze tunneled down to the ends of the two sharp, wooden bolts, and she did some serious, meditative breathing, fought down the feral, mated part of herself with an extreme effort.

“Quentin,” Giles began, equally impassive. He did not smile. “Welcome to my place of business.” That last exited his mouth with a tiny, Ripper-like edge, made to buy her time.

“Yes, quite the welcome,” the lead Council jerk answered, with an equal, and supercilious edge, “considering we were sent an ultimatum to arrive within the hour, or else.” His eyes darted up to take in the dangling gallery of Scoobies, then back down to meet Buffy’s eyes, at which point he jerked, studied her a little longer and harder. Frowned, moved on to Faith, skittered over Spike, glaring with a look of rippling revulsion. His gaze started to move on. 

Buffy halted him sharply. “Lose the crossbows. Now.” The words sounded alien on her lips, and yep. Definitely needed to get rid of the threat, or she would be in no shape to have anything like a verbal debate.

Travers’ beady eyes jerked back to hers. “Excuse me?”

Like words were her strong suit at the best of times, dammit. “I said, lose the crossbows.” He needed to pick up what she was putting down, stat. Before she lost it and started a little Slayer ballet. “Or I will  _ break _ them.” ‘And maybe the people holding them,’ was implicit in her flat unemotional tones.

No one moved. Unless you counted a lot more eye-darting. Travers seemed fascinated with her eyes, in a sort of cruel, hawkish sort of way. Probably she was fighting down the golden-y thing.

Buffy exhaled heavily, at a loss for words.

Faith took over for her, then, with a little wave upward toward their backup singers. Apparently she felt the struggle. “I’d do what she says. Not that they’ll do you any good anyway. You wouldn’t get a shot off. We have three witches up there—four, if the ex-demon decides to chip in—ready to knock down anything you send at B’s vamp.” 

Travers’s eyes glanced up to the witches’ gallery, came back down to center first on Faith, then back on Buffy. The wetworks guys hands wavered slightly, which allowed the bright, fuzzy haze in Buffy’s brain to retreat just a hair. Reprieved, Buffy sighed and narrowed her eyes at the head Watcher, let him see the surety of his own short future in them. How very serious she was. “My trigger is touchier than theirs.” She shot them both a short, pointed look. “Drop. It.”

The bolts lowered just slightly. Their aim was no longer strictly on Spike’s heart. He relaxed infinitesimally, though to be fair, they could snap the weapons back to target him in an instant.

She returned to Travers, frustrated but far more capable now of communicating in full sentences. “I don’t know what part of ‘ally’ you guys don’t understand, because it’s a really short word.” She smiled sweetly then. “I know we have our language barriers, between English-English and Cali-girl English…” /And feral Slayer…/ “…But I’d think ‘hurt my guy and I’ll destroy you’ is pretty succinct.”

Travers eyed her for a short moment, wary now, as if reading her intentions. But then, with a brief nod to each side of himself, he indicated assent. The two wetworks goons flanking him slowly but reluctantly lowered their weapons, though they immediately replaced them with crosses and continued to stand around tensely in that way that said they were not quite crouching at the ready, but intended to do so at even the faintest move from said vampire.

At her side, Spike settled back into his standard ‘looking like I’m slouching, but really I’m prepared for just about anything’ pose. Buffy leaned in a little to press her shoulder to his; an ephemeral moment’s shared reassurance.

Travers’ eyes remained locked on hers for the briefest second before they slid away to settle on Mom. “Mrs. Summers, is it?”

“Murderous bastard who tried to have my baby killed, is it?” Mom answered without skipping a beat.

/Oooh, shots fired, Mom!/ 

Quentin’s shoulders set back just a little, and he straightened. Behind him, the gathered Watchers, busily poking around through the contents of the store’s shelves, all froze and turned to stare at her, as if shocked by her blunt accusation. “Madame, I must assure you…” Travers began.

Mom cut him off before he could get going. “Don’t bother. I know all about you bastards. Rest assured, I’m not particularly glad that we have to do business with you, and I’ll be happy to see your backs once you’re out of the state. But Buffy assures me you might have helpful information for us, so I’ve agreed not to press charges against you… for the time being.”

It hung there between them for a long moment. The Head Watcher blinked, looking, for the first time that Buffy could remember, alarmed. “You’ve decided  _ what _ ?”

/Hehe, you didn’t expect that, did you scumbag?/

Mom smiled slightly; an expression that quite honestly terrified Buffy whenever she saw it. “You were party to a plan to drug my daughter, kidnap her, board her up in a house with a murderous sex-offender who then kidnapped me and subjected me to terrifying trials which afforded me no little PTSD, and forced my oldest child to resort to murder in self-defense. Frankly, I’m a little irate about the whole thing…”

From the back, one of the spare Watchers, one of the women, broke in with, “Murder?” sounding aghast at this classification of the staking of a vampire.

Behind him, the balding Watcher was arrested by an entirely other part of her speech. “Oldest child, mum?”

Buffy felt a little like she had been slapped. Reeling, numb thoughts crept up with startling sharpness. /Oh. Crap./ Apparently the spell the monks did didn’t reach so far as random Watchers back in England.

Mom wasn’t done yet, though, and gave no one else time to recognize what she had said, or the implications of it. “You also sent a trio of men after this other young woman who was, at least briefly, in my charge. I might not get anywhere with pressing charges, since I know you’re all not only from outside the country, but you can probably pull strings, and a lot of this stuff includes things I can’t prove…” Her smile widened a little, took on a vindictive edge as she reached behind Buffy to lay a loving, possessive hand on Spike’s arm. “Obviously I have to leave the part about your assassination attempt against my son-in-law to Buffy. But whatever the eventual outcome, putting you in litigation sure would make things unpleasant for you for a while, and get you attention you don’t want, which sounds just peachy to me.”

Mom definitely knew how to sell pissed off and ready to sue your ass, and for the record? Buffy was damn proud to be her daughter.

Giles was currently staring at Mom with a look of pure admiration on his face, which dissolved near the end into a faint smile, directed down into the glasses he had plucked off to briefly cradle in his hands. He replaced them, smirking slightly, before he schooled his expression back to blandness. 

Spike didn’t bother to hide his satisfaction, however. He was grinning like a gargoyle as he pulled out a cigarette and began to twiddle it between his fingers. “I love you so bloody much, Joyce,” he informed her casually.

Mom favored their vampire with a brief, if warm glance. “I love you back, Sweetie.”

Quentin seemed wholly nonplussed, if for only a brief moment. It was tough to tell if it was more for the warmth between Mom and Spike, or for the threat. He opened his mouth, closed it, then shook off his paralysis and straightened back into his usual bully stance. “Mrs. Summers, I very much regret, of course, that you were pulled into your daughter’s  _ Tento di Cruciamentum _ , but you must understand that it is exceedingly odd that she continues to live with a family member in the first place, and to concede that you in fact have no place in these proceedings…”

“Go to hell,” Mom informed him pleasantly.

“Madame!” Travers exclaimed, as if he thought she was terribly out of line and needed to show better manners. 

/Alright, that’s it!/ It was one thing for them to try to put rails around Buffy. She was barely out of high school. But for them to try to tell a grown woman like her mother how to act? 

Buffy kind of really wanted to punch him in the face. “Can I hit him, Giles? Just a little? I mean, I know he’s like, sixty, but…”

Giles’ lips twitched. “I suppose not. I rather think I might, however.”

Travers reared back, looking sour and offended by this apparent betrayal. “You used to respect us, Giles,” he began, all Captain Disappointment. “You used to be one of us.” 

Giles snorted in open disdain. “You used to pay me. If you recall, firing me was not my idea.”

Sketchy eyebrows went up. “Touché.” Travers’ eyes flickered darkly over to take in Spike’s silent presence. “You also used to be sane, though, and to follow the rules. The sort that were made to keep us all properly unmuddled and certain of our places. Honestly,” and here he went forbidding, his voice dripping with disdain. “Rupert, what you have permitted here? It was bad enough the first time! To allow it again? You obviously have no control whatsoever over your Slayer. Permitting her to remain in her family home, to allow her mother to become involved; to waltz off to college unsupervised… and now this? Yet again, and to this extent?” A weary headshake, filled with gravitas and regret. “Even a man with your checkered past ought to know better!”

Giles’ lips twitched again. “I didn’t  _ allow _ anything. It wasn’t my place.” Crossing his arms, he leaned back against the table. “Spike, Buffy, care to chime in?”

Buffy followed his gaze to meet Travers’ eyes, Spike’s presence a solid bulwark at her side. “You seem to be functioning under some kind of misunderstanding. You see,  _ I _ run this town. William the Bloody is its Master, and controls the demons’ side in my name.” She smiled slightly, confident in the response she would get. “Tell me; what did your… interrogations of the locals net you about how that’s going, around here?”

Travers grunted, looking, for him, slightly lost. “The, ah, barkeep at the local demon-haunt was very complimentary about the peace you’ve brokered on this hellmouth,” he admitted grudgingly. “The town has never been so quiet, he says.” His lips twisted, then. “He also says that you’ve been permitting all sorts of demons to come and go without so much as a by-your-leave…”

“Because they aren’t doing anything wrong,” Buffy pointed out flatly. “I don’t kill without cause. There’s a difference between being the Slayer and being a murderer.”

Murmurs traveled through the tweedy throng, some surprised at her choice of words, most of them shocked by the use of ‘murderer’. 

Travers shook his head very slowly, eyes flickering once more to Spike. He shifted his stance, going exceedingly grim. “Buffy, I think your Watcher hasn't reminded you lately of the resolute status of the players in our little game. The Council fights evil. Demons are evil…”

_ “Some,” _ Buffy interrupted easily, but with force.  _ “Some _ are evil…”

“…The Slayer is the instrument by which we fight…” Travers broke back in, voice raised and now harsh with insistence. 

“Well, that's a very comforting, bloodless way of looking at it, isn't it? And she's not your bloody instrument!” Giles’ scorn was real, as was his irritation. 

Travers ignored his former Councilmember, his eyes on Buffy. “The Council remains, the Slayers change. It's been that way from the beginning…”

Buffy shook her head, arms still crossed. “No, Mr. Travers. You have it backward. The  _ Slayers _ fight evil, when necessary, and  _ wherever it appears. _ I’ve had to fight humans using witchcraft, who’ve summoned demons, who’ve been possessed, who’ve made robots, Franken-monsters, operated on demons without anesthesia, turned the swim-team into fish… or who are just truly bad people and want to kill my friend who’s only a demon three days out of the month. I’ve had to find my way through that without harming humans unduly, and I’ve learned that evil has a soul, and that demons can be my allies against evil.” Turning, she tugged out a stake and slapped it down, hard, on the table behind her, resulting in a sharp  _ crack _ that made not a few of the Watchers behind Travers jump. “And you’re also wrong about the order. The  _ Slayer _ has been here since the beginning. The face of the Slayer changes… but the spirit, the soul of the Slayer has been the same since the start. You guys? You’re the ones who are…” She snapped her fingers, looking for the right word.

“Transient?” Spike offered helpfully.

“That’s it. Transient,” Buffy agreed, and picked up the stake once more to twiddle it through her fingers, as if she found them beneath her notice. “You fade in and out, and you’re completely interchangeable, but we? We’re the real deal.” Lifting her eyes from the stake, she drilled them hard into Travers’ lined, distasteful countenance. “We’re not  _ your _ instrument. You are  _ ours _ .”

Travers’ face suffused with outrage. “Young lady…”

“No.” She couldn’t let him get rolling, or he’d try to plow her under. She had to keep the upper hand. “I don’t think you know what you’re dealing with, here. But I do. The Slayer dream has assured me that I am well within my rights to have mated the Line so that it’s no longer lonely, unbalanced, and so desperate for companionship that it’ll listen to what you people say just to get a little help on a road thousands of years in the making…”

“Mated?” Travers choked, looking shaken for the first time, if not horrified.

It was a gamble… but they were likely to hear about it from the locals anyway. Best to use it to their advantage than to have it come out behind their backs. /Hell, they’ll want to kill me for a wild-card after tonight anyway. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’, isn’t that the saying?/

/A pound of what, though?/

Besides… their knowing that she had mated her vampire would assure them that dusting him would also destroy her. If they actually wanted to salvage her in any meaningful way to ‘reeducate’ her and use her in the fight against Glory, they would have to find another way to do it.

Buffy favored them all with a cold smile as she reached up to pull her hair back, fisted it into a ponytail. She knew the recently-renewed marks on her neck would be visible to all and sundry within a ten-foot radius. “Spike?”

Spike silently turned down his collars to show his mark.

“Bleedin’ Christ…” one of the Watcher-lackeys gasped from off to one side, and stumbled backward so hard he fell into a display of crystal dragons. He belatedly made to catch the ones that tried to topple to the floor, caught them with numb hands and righted them, eyes bulging.

Both wetworks guys had their crossbows up again, pointed at  _ her _ this time. They never hesitated as they fired, instinctively. 

From behind them, Buffy heard one whispered word, from three throats.  _ “Obvia!”*  _

The crossbow bolts fell to the ground before them, impotent.

Travers stared, wordless, his eyes glancing horror and hate at her marked throat, then flickered to the ammunition littering the floor between them. Back again to her neck. Then he lifted his hand once and dropped it, without even looking at the men flanking him. 

They stepped back, hands shaking, slowly lowered their weapons. Their teeth remained bared with hate, though, and Travers’ eyes never left her throat.

Buffy ignored his expression; the one that wrote a death-sentence on hold for her. “Sineya broke free in the dream, because we gave her love.” Buffy found Spike’s free hand, folded hers into it. “I’m not bound to you anymore. Neither is Faith. And yeah; you could kill us all so you could start all over at ground zero with a shiny new Slayer… but after this, I’m pretty sure the Line would fight you tooth and nail, because she’s known what it’s like to be free of you. To be sufficient unto herself, and to feel truly partnered. What was that thing you said, Spike, about the falcons?”

“Girl has a demon in her isn’t keen anymore to your glove, lads,” Spike answered pithily. He’d told her and Faith about how falconry worked the other day, while they were planning this little face-off. About how hunting hawks were trained by near-starving them, till they associated the man with the glove as the source of food and affection, and became near-tame… because they were not domesticated, but wild-things made dependent on humans for sustenance. They learned to hunt when released, but they brought their kills back to the glove, because they’d been brainwashed, thought themselves dependent, and forgot that they could leave anytime to live off what they struck down... because the glove was where the food was. 

And the glove was jesses, and a cage each night, and a life of service in captivity. Short stints of flight at another’s pleasure, and measured meals meant to keep them ‘keen’ to serve another day, till they forgot they had ever been wild or free, and never knowing what it might be like to fly at their own whim, for the sheer pleasure of it. To fall, fail, or succeed on their own merits. “Doubt any of the chits’ll come to you lot for tiny gobbets of meat and fly for you now they’ve known what it’s like to hunt clean, and take what’s theirs by right.”

“That,” Buffy answered curtly. “You’re just gonna have to trust that we know what to hunt, and why. And besides. I’m not sure how you’d beat Glory with a newbie like that anyway… and I  _ know _ you don’t think you could do it with your wetworks guys, or even a bazooka, or you wouldn’t even be here trying to talk to us. So maybe I’d think twice before parading in here telling us what to do. Because you’re just the support staff. We’re the  _ Slayers _ .”

“You can’t be serious!” It was the dark-haired male Watcher, from before, speaking up from the back of the crowd. “You’re damaged goods! You can’t possibly think…”

/Damaged goods? Seriously? What is this, the Dark Ages?/ 

Buffy calmed Spike’s sudden, hypersonic snarling with a gentle caress over the back of his hand with her thumb. “Oh, I’m deadly serious. You people think you’re gonna come in here and make us jump through hoops. Do tests, or a ‘review’ or whatever to distract me until you can find a way to get me and Spike separate, then kill me. Then you can, what? Somehow use that to rope Faith back into the fold. Scare her back into obedience?”

Faith made a loud, derisive noise from where she lounged against the table. 

“And meanwhile, we have an apocalypse building, and you’ve got this whole, ‘you have to be worthy of whatever 411 we brought’ game going, like you can leverage us into ‘behaving’. But that’s bullshit.” Buffy smiled at them, let them see the deadly edge there, the power flickering in her gaze. “There isn't gonna be a review. No ‘interviews’ of my friends… And you’re for damn sure not going to hurt a hair on mine or Spike’s head.” 

“But if you’re still taking civilians out on your patrols…” the female Watcher began, uncertainly, from the back.

“Not very often, since I mostly patrol with Spike now. But I think I’m good either way.” Buffy waved a hand up to the dangling gallery of Scoobies. “I don’t need you guys in the day-to-day. I have three very powerful witches, two summoners, and a thousand-year-old ex-demon on tap. I think they can cover the research… and our butts, if you decide to go rogue on us. As we speak they’re ready to do any defensive magicks I request to hold you all in stasis or whatever, if you so much as try to touch me, or Spike, or Faith, or Giles; and don’t even get me  _ started _ on my Mom...”

One of the Watchers stammered, looking exceedingly taken aback. “And they all… accept that you…”

Travers lifted his hand again, tilted his head slightly. He looked like nothing so much as a grizzled hawk stooping. “Glory is stronger than you. She's a more powerful instrument, if you will; of evil, though at this pass I cannot say whose instrument  _ you _ are. I would like to think you’re still the instrument of good, but I have no way of knowing this. You are the one who has gone very thoroughly rogue…”

/Oh, please./

“…So you can see how we are at an impasse, young woman. We have information that might very well help you to defeat her; and the fact that you wish to do so is a mark in your favor. Or, it might be simply that you are upset the creature is encroaching in a territory you’ve claimed as yours with your…”

“Mate?” Buffy supplied helpfully, and watched his lip curl in derision. “I suppose that could be the case, but it’s not. I have plenty of reasons to want her out of here. Believe it or not, I’m not a fan of the world ending. And, shockingly, neither is Spike…”

“Goodbye Picadilly Circus,” he put in blandly, echoing past sentiments, “farewell Leicester bloody Square. Not a good look for any of us.” 

/Please don’t mention Happy Meals with legs, Spike…/

“And I don’t know about you lot, but I like the hounds and my Man United matches a bit too much to see the whole bloody thing sod off to hell, innit?” he went on smoothly, gave up twiddling his cigarette between his fingers and stuck it between his lips, though he didn’t light it. “Not to mention the World Cup’s on again next year, and hell if I’m gonna miss another chance for Three Lions to bring footie home for a soddin’ change…” 

Every Watcher in the bunch shifted a little, as if his very British little speech had hit them right square between the eyes. Even the two wetworks guys looked oddly moved. 

Hard, blue eyes flickered up to skewer the head Watcher, fierce and uncompromising. “Then, there’s the girl. Be a right git if I let her fight alone, wouldn’t I? Let it all go to pot when she’s in it?”

Unlike his compatriots, Travers didn’t change his expression. “The reasoning behind our reviews and interviews is to prove to us that you will follow our recommendations, that you are still amenable, still on our side. Otherwise, and should you resist, we will know that we cannot trust you to…” 

“Oh, nonsense, Quentin!” Giles burst out. “Resisting your recommendations? She fails if we don't do whatever you say! How much under your thumb do you think we are?”

Travers lifted one brow, and his eyes flitted over to land very pointedly on Spike. “How much do you want our help?”

Spike was very abruptly growling once more, low and terrible, which, what?

When Giles replied, he sounded like he’d been punched in the stomach. “Oh, you venal bastard.”

/Wait, what…/ “Giles, what…”

Her Watcher’s voice was bleak and shaking with disgust when he answered. “He wants you to stake Spike, and then they’ll help.”

Buffy went perfectly still as she fought off the thing inside herself, tussled it as it strove to come to the surface. 

They didn’t even want to do it themselves. The cruel bastard wanted  _ her _ to have to do it… and they were trying to hold the world hostage against her to get her to… to kill her own  _ mate _ before they’d…

No way they’d actually  _ do _ that, would they? Risk the  _ world _ just to be right? Or even because they were scared of what  _ she _ might become, with him?

Were they really that afraid of an untrammeled Slayer?

“It’ll destroy her,” Giles breathed, aghast. “You do realize that, Quentin?”

/Maybe that’s the point./

As if to underline her thought, Travers answered without inflection except maybe to sound self-satisfied. “Sacrifices must be made in the name of the right…”

“I have my lawyer on speed-dial as we speak,” Mom broke in, horrified and with her business cell in her hand. “I cannot  _ believe _ you’d hold my son-in-law hostage… That you would threaten my daughter with… with… That you would insist that she…”

“How… How could you  _ not?” _

It was one of the female Watchers, breaking in to interject. “I mean, far be it from me to want to see him gone from the world, in a way. Getting to be in the same room with him is a treat, to be sure. He’s a legend. But I still don’t at all understand how you can possibly trust a vampire with a reputation like William the Bloody’s…” Her eyes jumped to Buffy’s, and they were filled with amazement; with terror. “How you were so bold as to permit him such power over you…”

/Oh. Oh!/

Buffy almost laughed, the realization was so stupidly idiotic, in the face of the gut-wrenching horror.

Spike had no such compunctions, did not hold back. His growl cracked into a sudden, amazed chortle of dark amusement. “Now I see the soddin’ problem. Hell. Do you nits know nothing about nest politics? I thought you were supposed to be the soddin’ experts!”

/All of this because they think he… They’re worried he’ll… influence me. That I…/

/Oh, for God’s sake.../ 

Suddenly, Buffy could relax. It was all so  _ simple _ , and Buffy could breathe again as she passed over the idiot Travers to pin the woman with a  _ look _ . “A, I’m in charge of this particular outfit. The only one who has the power in our little arrangement is me. And B, I know more about Spike than you  _ ever _ could.”

The woman drew herself up, stammer briefly vanishing. “I really rather doubt it.”

Spike uncoiled a little and straightened to eye the woman with interest. “Heard of me, have you?” he asked.

The woman went abruptly flustered, smiled a little, looked away, her body language suddenly shy. “I… ah… wrote my thesis on you.”

/Oh, jeez. Someone has a little crush./

Spike clearly caught it as well. He started to grin as he scanned the chick, standing there all uncertain in her straight-laced, pinstriped suit, with her hair in a tight bun. He had that look in his eye that said he was taking this whole repression thing as a personal challenge. 

Buffy rolled her eyes. /Oh, damn./

“Well, well. Isn’t that  _ neat _ .” Spike tilted his head. “Tell me, pet, now that we’re such good friends… how do I compare in person?” 

“I, ah…”

Spike’s nostrils flared slightly as the woman stammered.

Buffy elbowed him hard in the belly. “Don’t mind him. He’s a professional flirt. But he belongs to me, so you’re safe…” Buffy led, and waited. 

The starstruck Watcher blinked at her, at sea. “Lydia.” 

“Lydia.” Buffy brought her gaze back to Travers, held it hard. “I’m the Master, if you will, of Sunnydale when it comes to this arrangement. Spike is… the enforcer, and the figurehead, because he’s the demon they know. But when it comes to who’s in charge, I have the blood edge, so you don’t need to worry about him ‘influencing me’ or whatever stupid crap you’ve been telling yourselves.” She brought her gaze back to Lydia and smiled slightly. “And, uh, if you want an in-person interview, I think I can arrange something for you. He might surprise you, considering the Council bio you probably used for your thesis is kind of a load of crap…”

Spike made a low, sharp growly sound, just for her ears, in warning. He was good with expanding on his legend with this chick… but not with smashing it completely. /Fine, Mr. Infamy./ “Not that that necessarily means you’ll get anything new, of course,” Buffy went on smoothly. “But you’d still be talking to the source.” She lifted amused eyes to her irritated love. “He doesn’t bite anymore. Or, at least, not outside the bounds of very specific and personal rules…”

“Oh, c’mon, Slayer; now you’ve gone and taken away half the fun. If I can’t make the bird go all fluttery…”

“Chill. I need to make a few more points.”

Spike sighed and subsided back to the table. “Didn’t know I had a fan club in the Council of Wankers, love. Wanted to bask a bit in my notoriety is all.”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

He rolled his eyes, but remained silent.

“So.” Buffy turned back to Travers, who was staring at her and Spike with an expression of unleavened disgust. “Have I settled even a little bit of your stupid concerns that I’m not in my right mind, or that I’m under the influence of evil demon wiles or whatever?”

Travers looked grumpy. “Perhaps a demonstration?”

Buffy shook her head immediately, before Spike even had a chance to resume snarling. “Nope. Spike’s not a trained poodle. He’s my mate. I don’t make him jump through hoops… and I’ve jumped through enough of yours in the last couple of years to have earned your trust. You’re just gonna have to take my word for it.” She tapped her stake on her left palm, calling the meeting back to order. “Now. Here’s how it’s going to be. I’m going to keep running my hellmouth the way I see fit, because that’s the way it works best, and is the safest for me and every human and demon on it. You people are going to give us the 411 I need to beat Glory, and then you’re going to pack up and get the hell out of here to go tend your library or whatever the heck it is you do in London when you’re not harassing the people who actually do the fighting. Because…”

“I think you’ve grossly misunderstood your position in the battle between good and evil, young lady, and your status on the hierarchy, the amount of power…”

Buffy interrupted him right back. “No, I haven’t. See, I have power, and you don’t. And it drives you crazy. It’s why you came all the way from England to talk to me about my newest big bad. You could’ve just given me the info you had over the phone, but instead you had to come piling down here to put on a big old show and figure out what was the what. And the reason for that wasn’t to determine whether or not I was good enough to be ‘let back in’.” Buffy leaned forward to lock her eyes on Travers’ wrinkled, angry visage. “You came to beg me to let  _ you _ back in. To give your jobs, your lives some semblance of meaning.”

The most talkative of the male Watchers broke in, sounding fiercely offended, with his slicked-down black hair and his nose in the air. “This is beyond insolence! You should be reeducated, if not simply removed…”

Buffy threw the stake. It was out of her hand and quivering in the wall in front of the guy’s nose before he could even shift an eyelash.

He shut up, stunned.

“That was excellent,” Xander cheered, sotto, from behind them on the shelf deal.

“I mean, wow,” Jonathan chimed in.

“Is she always that… accurate?” Andrew whispered, sounding terrified.

“Usually,” Willow answered, flat-voiced from holding the magicks.

“I’m thinking, no more interruptions,” Buffy informed the gathered Watchers, then pushed away from the table to face down the seven tweedy, not-so-imposing figures. “Okay. Let me tell you how it is. You're Watchers. Without us…” She gestured back to a grinning Faith, “without Slayers, you're pretty much just watchin'  _ Masterpiece Theater _ .”

Spike snorted in grim amusement. 

“It doesn’t matter how I do my job. It doesn’t matter who I do it with. It doesn’t matter how Faith does it, or that she’s allies with Angel down in LA. None of that matters. It doesn’t matter who we sleep with—which by the way, why that’s such a giant topic of concern for everybody is way beyond me, and really kind of gross, let’s be real—or how we manage the demon populations where we live. None of that matters, because You. Can't. Stop. Glory. You can't do anything with the information you have except maybe publish it in the ‘Everyone Thinks We're Insane-O's Home Journal’. So,” Buffy went on firmly, and pinned the gawking, amazed jerks with her gaze, “if you actually want to do that whole ‘fighting the good fight’ thing, I think you’d better shut up and make with the helping, starting now.”

Travers’ mouth set into a grim line. “You believe you can make us do whatever you wish. You think you have all the power here. But you have another weakness which we can exploit; factors which should motivate you to go along with any requests we might ask of you. Now, I don't want to do this, but obviously we could shut this place down permanently…”

He was trying to take her power back. He was trying to bully them. And she didn’t doubt that even if she spent twenty-four-seven protecting Spike, they had that bureaucratic power Giles had spoken of to come after her Watcher. She couldn’t protect them both. 

They were going to try to pull the green card card. “Here’s where you tell me that if I don’t play your game, you’ll get Giles deported, huh?”

“If you insist on fighting us, yes. We can arrange to have Mr. Giles on a plane within the day. He’ll never set foot in this country again; and without his protection—and even with your redoubtable mother at your side—you will be vulnerable. You and your… consort.” Travers drew himself up, his lips writhing as if he were tasting something foul. “Perhaps you're used to idle threats and sloppy discipline, Miss Summers, but you're dealing with grownups now, and I will have you behave as the Slayer you were meant to be, or you will be eliminated.” His eyes flickered to Spike, back to her. “Am I making myself clear?”

Spike growled, low in his throat. Made to speak… but Mom beat him to it. “Mr. Giles is a member of the local business community, with ties to at least seven going concerns both within and outside of Sunnydale. Some of those businesses are demon businesses, and as such he has the connections to seek the umbrella protection of Wolfram and Hart without any great fiduciary loss. I believe you might be familiar?”

Travers gave a start, and his eyes swung to meet Giles’, clearly horrorstruck. “You wouldn’t!”

Giles lifted a shoulder, dropped it. “They may not necessarily be the most savory of contacts, but the ends justify the means. I should think keeping my Slayer here on the hellmouth and fully supported—the only Slayer with the level of experience and the networking essential to beating a creature who seems embarked on a career to plunge the world into some sort of dimensional disaster—well qualifies as such.”

For the first time, Travers looked floored. “My God, Rupert, I cannot believe that you have stooped so low as to… To involve yourself with demons in your business, in your daily…”

“I’m a demon,” Buffy interrupted flatly. “Have been since I was Called; or at least partly. So is Faith. Not that you all ever really let us in on that little tidbit. Probably because you didn’t want us to know we were murdering our own kind…”

“Oh, this is ludicrous!” the balding Watcher burst out from behind Travers. “You can’t expect us to allow this sort of… mutiny…”

Faith threw her stake in a flash; a sinuous copy of Buffy’s move. It shortly quivered in the wall behind baldy’s left ear. 

Baldy cut off as if he’d had his throat slit, and stood there gaping.

“Pretty sure Buffy said no more interruptions,” Faith put in, smiling, and settled her hand on her hip. Which, incidentally, was where she had yet another stake sitting pretty in her belt, just inside the curve of her loin. Her fingertips tapped the hard length of it, like she was letting them know she, too, had a nice phallus ready to use at a moment’s notice. “Man, these boys have short attention spans, B.”

Spike chuckled and sent her a nod, smirking.

Buffy had a tough time biting back her own smile, felt it twitch at the corners of her lips. “Thanks, Faith. Now, where were we? Oh, right. The part where you were making a bunch of empty threats and we were pulling your fangs…”

“Now, listen here, young lady…”

“No,  _ you _ listen. We’re the ones with the upper hand…”

“I beg your pardon!”

Buffy smiled grimly and patted her own backup stake. “Magicks. Weapons. Years of defending a hellmouth under our belts. A vamp who will happily rip your throats out on my word…”

“Are you honestly  _ threatening _ …”

“And my mother. Which… you  _ really _ don’t want to piss her off…”

“You really don’t. And, for the record, I’m already fairly upset.”

“Madame, you have no idea what you are…”

“Oh, I have plenty idea,” Mom cut him off grimly. “You believe you own my daughter and Faith. That you have the right to put them through deadly tests, to control their lives, to remove them from their families if you wish, to use them as you see fit, to send teams of violent men to tie them up and kidnap them, spirit them off to other countries without trial, at any age, to control who they sleep with—or whether they have relationships at all—to keep them out of school, to tell them where to live; no doubt even what they should wear and eat and when they should sleep in most cases. Probably for how long, too. You demand they risk their lives day and night without a single moment’s rest, without counseling for their post-traumatic stress, without assistance, without pay, without medical benefits, without a damned clothing allowance for their damaged property! Yes, I know about you, Quentin Travers! Rupert told me! You haven’t paid him his full stipend since you found out that Buffy was still living at home with me instead of living with him the way you expected him to arrange things!”

Buffy blinked, stunned. Giles had never been paid the way most Watchers got paid? Then how had he managed to put away that whole big savings account for her?

“On top of that—and this is absolutely beyond credulity to me, that you would say this out loud, with me in the room—you think you can threaten them with death if they don’t go along with everything you dictate to them? And you think we should all just fall all over ourselves to agree with you because you are ‘on the side of good’? Because I don’t know about you, but to me, you sound like a bunch of truly terrible people with no conscience, treating young women like slaves for thousands of years and making them do things that you can’t or won’t do for yourselves, and without even the remotest genuflection toward anything like adequate compensation! And on top of that, you guilt-trip them if they don’t keep on with it.” She slapped her hand down on the table with a resounding  _ whap _ . “I’d call that evil. 

“Meanwhile,” she went on in lower, intensified tones that rang with sincerity, “I’ve lived for a year with this _ vampire _ … and he backs up my daughter in her work, and he helps her to rest. He gives her emotional assistance, and advises her as to the ins and outs of the world into which she has been thrown by this Calling of yours. He helps her process the things she must face. He supports her in her fights. He’s there for her in the field. He ensures that she has less enemies to confront. He offers his viewpoint, but he doesn’t tell her what to do when she faces a moral dilemma, and he never tries to control her. He merely loves her. I’d call  _ him _ the good one.”

Buffy felt tears well up in her eyes. Mom had intended to come in here and hand these guys their asses, and she had. But she had done more than that; she’d put everything into perspective. 

Spike’s voice trembled slightly when he spoke, but it also sounded exalted. “‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’, innit? Joyce, you’re a wonder.”

“I’m pissed off, Spike. These men think they own my little girl. They’re about to get a shock.” Her jaw worked as she stared at them. “How many times have you actually had to deal with an irate parent with the law on her side… when the girl’s Watcher is also over here, on this side of the line, instead of helping you tear a family apart? Huh? Because I think it hasn’t happened very often. And I think Rupert might just help me convince a few lawyers over there at Wolfram and Hart to take a case involving a group like yours; one that dabbles in things supernatural, one that would believe the parts I couldn’t prove in a standard California court. And I bet those guys might even really like to score one over on you. I bet there’s bad blood back there somewhere in your history. So I’d think twice before pissing me off any more than you already have.”

Travers’ jaw worked for a sec. When he spoke, it was in a sort of grated, reluctant way. “What do you want, madame?”

Mom didn’t skip a beat. “I want my daughter paid. I want Faith paid, for their time and hard work. I want them to have medical benefits, so that when my daughter leaves college she will have a job and coverage when she gets hurt slaying, because the limited coverage she gets from the college clinic doesn’t really do broken bones, and Faith has nothing, and I don’t want either of them to have to end up working in some fast food place during the day and slaying at night and getting zero sleep because they’re kowtowing to your idea of what a Slayer should live up to. And I want you to leave after this and never come back, and keep your wetworks bastards away from them, and away from my son-in-law, away from my entire family, or I’ll find a way to  _ end _ you. Because I don’t trust any of you to leave this alone after these three finish off this Glory person. I expect you to try to come back and kill my daughter and Spike, and maybe Faith, because they stood up to you, and I refuse to allow that. So I am going to have to insist that you never come back to this country again as long as they’re alive; not you, and not anyone else remotely related to your outfit…”

“Madame, you simply do not have the power to insist on any such thing…”

“Pursuant to which, our witches have arranged a spell to bind you all to an agreement indicating that you will do exactly that. Otherwise, we will be in litigation as of tomorrow.”

Travers’ eyes flickered to catch on Giles’, looking bitter as gall. “You were on the inside once, Giles. You know what sort of resources we command. Do you actually believe…”

Giles interrupted him without qualm. “I’d rethink any resistance or threats, Quentin. The ladies are quite resolute.”

Travers’ eyes sharpened, darted to Buffy, to Faith, to Spike. “How long,” he asked quietly, “do you actually think you can stay awake and wary?”

Buffy smiled, deadly. “If you hurt my fiancé, I’ll kill every last one of you.” Watched their shock at this open threat to human beings, in the name of a disgusting demon. Knew she wasn’t helping her case when it came to their perception of her as out of control, something that must be destroyed… but since they already believed it, she might as well scare them. “I’m not your ‘instrument’. I’m me. A student. A mate…”

_ “My _ mate, you insufferable prats, and I’ll send you to hell, every one, before you hurt her.”

“A daughter…”

_ “My _ daughter, and I’m right there with him.”

“A sister…”

“Hell… I’m down for a good fight. I don’t wanna die, and I’ll be damned if I go down just so you bastards can start in on some other poor kid.”

“And we’re a Line. And the Line is tired of being alone. The Line will fight the Council which imprisoned it, and to hell with what you want. It’s fighting you in our dreams, and it’s fighting you through us when we’re awake.” Buffy drilled her eyes into Quentin Travers’. “We’re wide awake now, Quentin. You can’t put us back to sleep. We’re a force to be reckoned with, and we’re not alone anymore. We have a mate, we have friends, we have family. You can’t beat us. So you’re going to tell us what you know about our enemy, and then you’re going to toddle on home back to England and try your best not to be another one of our enemies, because it’s always best to be on our side. The locals have learned that, and everything’s been just peachy around here since then.” She let the slow, sweet smile touch her lips, though it didn’t rise to the level of her eyes. “Just ask around.”

Travers lightly brushed his fingers on a stand nearby, gave a crystal ball a tiny shove so that it rocked on its little mahogany plinth. “We've discovered information about this creature, your Glory. Some of it is clearly vital, the rest merely extremely disturbing. And it won't be handed over until we're convinced that you are… prepared for it.” His eyes came back to Buffy’s, hot and full of distrust. “Everything I’ve heard and seen here today convinces me that you are the last person we should entrust with any information which is vital to the salvaging of…”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Yawn. Are  _ you _ going to take her down?”

Travers’ lips thinned. “We need to know that this information is safe.”

/Oh, for God’s sake./ “Right, because I’m banging a vampire, you can’t trust me not to, what? Run off and join Glory and help her end the world?” Wow, these guys were the absolute end. Didn’t they get that not wanting to have your life run by a bunch of dickish old men wasn’t the same thing as turning evil? 

“Frankly, young woman, we have no idea what to expect from you anymore. You have joined forces with William the Bloody. You’re giving free rein to the demons of this town…”

Spike scoffed. “She bloody well is  _ not _ . She still kills the ones as break the rules; does it without fail. She just doesn’t do it indiscriminate anymore, is all.”

Travers ignored him. “For all we know, based on this intelligence, you might hear something about your odds in this fight and decide to throw in with this Glory person instead of fighting her.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Quentin, she’s still a Slayer! She’s just refusing to play the game on your terms is all!”

Travers’ eyes glittered with something that was very much akin to evil. “Yes, and until she does, she will learn nothing about the Beast.”

They were scared of her. They were actually, legit scared of her. /They think if I’m not their ‘instrument’, then I’m an instrument of evil. There’s no in between in their heads./ “Alright. What’s your plan to beat her?”

Travers jerked. “I beg your pardon?”

/That’s what I thought./ Buffy had played poker with Spike enough times to know when to call someone’s bluff. 

Granted, most of those poker games had ended up with her absolutely and completely naked and very prepared to be plowed right into the mattress while Spike had been, at best, half-clothed, but she had learned a  _ few _ things, dammit. “You must have a plan. To beat Glory. If you’re so sure you don’t need us, and since Faith won’t help you if you’re gonna screw us. I assume you’ll all be setting up camp in my town. And since none of the locals here will be cooperating with you unless I ask them to, you’ll have to have a branch of your people prepared to patrol for the standard stuff while you work on the Glory angle, and a branch of people set aside to keep an eye on us, since you don’t trust us. And then there’s whatever you plan to do to stop her.” She tilted her head a little in that Spike-way she’d picked up from her guy; who was, by the way, currently swelling with pride in her and biting back a massive laugh she could  _ feel _ . “Which… was what again? Because she wants this Key thing, which she’s gonna use to open all these doors to a bunch of dimensions or whatever, so… What are your plans for keeping that out of her hands, by the way? And keeping her from using it to open up… well, everything?” She paused slightly, effecting a pensive air. “You’ll probably have to make your own Dagon Sphere, too, since, you know, no offense, but I’m planning on keeping mine in case she keeps coming after me…”

During this speech, Travers stared at her as if she were some kind of especially frustrating mold or fungus he had never seen before, which had sprouted eyes and a mouth and started sassing him. “You are an exceptionally irritating young woman. Are you aware of that, Miss Summers?”

Triumph soared through Buffy, blasted into the link, bounced into Spike, joined with his elation, slammed back into her doubled in potency. “Yup,” she answered perkily. “I’ve been told I’m a ‘right barmy bitch’, actually.” She reached back, folded her fingers in Spike’s. “I take it as a compliment.” She straightened, faced the man, as Spike would put it, ‘balls-out’ and legs akimbo. “The fact of the matter is, you can’t beat her without us, and you know it. And I am not your enemy. Neither is Spike, or Faith.” /Called your bluff, asshole, and you just folded./ “So here's how it's gonna work. You're gonna tell us everything you know. Then you're gonna do what my Mom says and go away. You'll contact us if and when you have any further information about Glory. You will fulfill all of my mother’s previously-stated requirements, or she will complete that call to Wolfram and Hart. Oh.” She shot a quick glance back at Giles. “And, the magic shop will remain open. Mr. Giles will stay here as my official Watcher, reinstated at full salary...”

Giles did a cough into his hand. Buried in the sound was the word, “Retroactive.”

“...To be paid retroactively from the month he was fired,” Buffy picked it up smoothly. “I will continue my work with the help of my mate and my friends, and you will touch none of them…”

Lydia broke in, stammering again. “I, ah... don't want a stake thrown at me, but… But, civilians. I… We're talking about children, whatever the status of their magicks, and…”

Buffy smiled up at the balcony, then turned pointedly back to the woman, let the smile fall away. “They’re the same age as me, and they’ve been with me, some of them, from the start. And none of you had any problem with sending me out into the field at fifteen…”

“Yes, well…” Lydia had the grace to look abashed. “But the dark-haired lad? The one who… who isn’t… Ah… At the pub, the lot down there said your company included a young man without any sort of power or…”

Buffy shook her head and cut the woman off firmly. “The ‘dark-haired lad’ has spent more time in the field than all of you combined. He’s part of the unit.”

Lydia cut off, clearly taken aback. Up on the shelf, she heard murmurs of satisfaction from Xander.

“Now,” Buffy picked back up, “you all may be very good at your jobs. The only way we're gonna find out is if you work with us. You can all take your time thinking about that.” She turned back to Travers. “But I want an answer right now from Quentin, 'cause I think he's understanding me.”

Travers cleared his throat, looking like he’d swallowed something sour. His eyes flickered away briefly to touch on Mom’s face. 

Mom’s determined expression didn’t shift even a tiny bit. She just held up her cell phone in warning.

The short silence was heavy and bitter… and followed by capitulation. “Your terms are acceptable.”

A coup. 

They had scored a coup against a hegemony ten thousand years in the making.

Beside her, Giles sagged abruptly. Buffy stared in shock, amazed that Travers had given in. She had thought he would cling to his points till the end of the world, but… He really was in it to save the world, and he would gamble on her being a better bet than Glory, at least.

Heartening.

Buffy found herself leaning back against Spike, while Faith straightened from her lean against the pillar to uncross her arms, abruptly less casual than she had looked in her studied pose. 

Up on the shelf behind them, the Scoobies had broken into wild applause and cheers, before cutting off in embarrassment. Even Andrew sounded like he’d gotten caught up in it. 

Buffy briefly met Mom’s eyes, then Giles’, then Spike’s. They returned her gaze, every one of them looking somewhat reserved, all of them aware that this truce could be broken at any moment if the Council saw fit to come after them again. 

They had made a serious enemy tonight. It was just… they were an enemy under wraps. 

They needed to be kept that way for as long and in as many ways as possible. “Wil,” Buffy called. “Tara. Jonathan. Anya, will you help?”

The four of them were down in a second, clambering one after another over the echoing ladder.

The agreement was cast swiftly, written out on a piece of loose-leaf Giles had set aside in a brief spate of wishful thinking. The spell required that Travers write it out by hand, and write it out he did, looking like he had swallowed a Vero Mango* the entire time. 

Buffy felt like she was going to burst into tears as the words were scrawled onto the page in the Head Watchers’ frustrated, cramped hand; leaned against Spike as each line glowed, set into magickal stone by the circle cast around him by her four friends while they held hands and chanted softly around him. Words glowed and subsided, stunning and life-altering as they settled into the paper; real ink and real concepts, like ‘retroactive payment’, and ‘immunity’, and ‘monthly living allowance’ and ‘clothing stipend’ and ‘annual recompense’ and ‘full medical coverage’ and ‘sick leave’ and ‘time off to be arranged on their own recognizance’ and ‘freedom to choose own associates’… and, possibly most importantly, ‘full cooperation, with hands-off guidance from parent organization, with no further direct contact unless specified by Slayers, the’, and ‘no further attempts to cause harm to Slayers, the, or known associates of Slayers, the, or persons or demons under the protection of Slayers, the’. So much fine print to that, including, ‘on pain of litigation by abovementioned attorneys at law’, and ‘as an Institution, beyond the current generation bearing the Watcher title’, and ‘as bound by magicks and set in the Airts and the Word’… and she really had to be dreaming, right?

Was this really happening?

Of course, they had to have something, as well. And Buffy was happy to give it, even if Spike growled the entire time. She signed it, too. ‘In exchange, the Sunnydale Slayer will attend to her duties as specified, and will perform adequately according to the dictates of instinct and the requirements of necessity, and will hearken to the guidance of the Watcher’s Council; to wit, Sunnydale Slayer will patrol the territory under her protection, will not fail to destroy any demon who is performing evil acts within that territory, and will endeavor to ensure the survival of humans within said territory.’ /As if I wouldn’t do that anyway./ It was kind of bridling that they thought she wouldn’t sign off on something like that. Of course, they would have to keep an eye out, with Giles’ and Mom’s and Spike’s help, to make sure the language didn’t bind them to anything… unwanted.

She was shocked and amazed when Faith agreed to the same, as ‘the Los Angeles Slayer’, and signed it with a flourish. Apparently she thought the bargain was worth it. Or, maybe she was just already planning on doing the thing, who knew. Faith even chipped in with her own part, a whole, ‘Current holder of the Line will stand ready to take over patrol of Sunnydale hellmouth, or to be stationed as needed in any other necessary supernatural hotspot depending on need, and will perform role as previously stated under Slayers, the, to be recompensed as previously stated under Slayers, the’, which was... unexpected. 

Once it was all done, and the ink stopped glowing, Wil and Tara dropped their hands and sagged, Jonathan stumbled back to the stair and sat down, and Anya sighed and turned to climb wordlessly past him back up to Xander. “Thanks, you guys. You’re bomb.”

Jonathan managed a faint smile, looking completely wiped. Wil and Tara snuggled together, their expressions indicating relief and satisfaction. Anya just waved backhandedly and sort of crawled into Xander’s arms, at which point Xan lifted his voice and called down, “I think she would rather have done the thing where we talked about sex and scared everyone.”

Buffy rolled her eyes and leaned back against Spike, distantly aware that she was trembling a little. His hands clamped down around her upper arms, held her tight for a second. She could feel his relief as it washed through her and back again, like a tide.

Letting out a long, slow breath, Travers sat back heavily in his seat and wiped his brow… and actually looked relieved. “Well.” And he glanced around him at all his hangers-on. “Weatherby, you and Collins can go. Relieve Smith at the back as well and set up at the car, will you?”

The two wetworks guys looked a little constipated, but they backed off to turn and head for the door, the guy with the receding hairline sneering a little as they departed. 

Spike relaxed just a hair after they disappeared onto the stoop, and dropped his hands away from Buffy’s arms. Buffy didn’t blame him at all for that.

The rest of the gathered Watchers just sort of stood around looking uncertain, like they weren’t sure if they should stay or go now that the fireworks were over. “Ah… tea, sir?” Lydia tried, sounding a little tremulous.

Giles’ lips twitched slightly. “I’ve a decent single malt behind the, ah, incense holders. For use during after-business hours, when we’re dealing with whatever slaying crisis presents itself. P’raps we could all use a dram?”

Travers looked amused for the first time since they’d all tromped in. “Yes. Quite.”

The dark-haired Watcher who looked like his nose never came out of the air started to look around him wildly, as if he could make the scotch appear in his hands if he just located the incense fast enough. “Where…”

“Over there,” the balding one announced, and practically darted for the incense section behind the counter.

Apparently they were all a little rattled.

Buffy held up a hand as the Brits started passing around the bottle and hunting around the shop for things to use as shot-glasses or tumblers. “Glory. I wanna know.”

Travers, who had already gotten his drink, unceremoniously tossed it back, then set down his glass (he’d been favored with one of Giles’ actual whiskey tumblers while Spike tapped his flask to Mom’s glass and Giles’ votive-holder). Turning to Buffy, the head Watcher tugged down his waistcoat, as if straightening it would help to clear his thoughts. “Well… there's a lot to go through.”

Buffy really didn’t have time for all the hemming and hawing. Not after the earlier bullshit she’d had to roll through with these jerks. They either had something for her or they didn’t, and she’d signed that stupid document for nothing. “I’m hoping you have something worthwhile to give me to justify your trip over here. At least let’s start off with the easy questions. Tell me what kind of demon I'm fighting, and we’ll go from there.”

Travers exhaled sharply, gave a little nod, and lifted his eyes to hers. And suddenly they were like shards of glass, bitter and slightly terrifying in their resignation. “Well, that's the thing, you see. Glory isn't a demon.”

/Wait, what?/ “What is she?”

“She’s not?” Spike demanded, lowering his flask from his lips. “Well, then, what the bloody hell is the slapper?”

Travers winced slightly, around the eyes. “She's a god.”

It rolled over Buffy; seven or so realizations at once. /Well, that explains a lot/ was followed by, /I guess I don’t feel so bad about getting my ass kicked twice, then/ after which she arrived at, /Oh,  _ man, _ how am I gonna protect Dawn from her if she… Holy crap, she’s a  _ god? _ / 

And, last but not least… /Wait. These bastards were afraid that, because she’s not a demon, and because I know I am one and I’m bonded to one, that I might’ve thrown in with her? Because, what? She’s a demon-god?/

Okay, wow. Talk about an insult. Yeah, she had no idea how she was going to beat a god, but that didn’t make it an ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ scenario! 

/What even?/

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Using Faith and Joyce, as well as Spike, to move the plot in a slightly different direction made this a lot of fun to write. Hope you all enjoyed!

oh, and the translation; _obvia_ = shielded


	31. Chapter 31

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do very much apologize for the lateness. RL be kickin' my butt. However, here we are: we begin with the immediate aftermath of the showdown with the Council, and go from there into some housekeeping, some discussion of some matters that need to be dealt with... and then we'll set the stage to launch the next bit of plottyness.
> 
> This is a pretty smutty chapter. It's all very... celebratory. *veg*

Buffy was outside with Spike, knees planted on the cool, smooth marble of one of those flat-to-the-ground tombstones, rolling her hips over him while his hands and her own slid over her body, a counterpoint to the warm, tickling flow of the Santa Anas as they rolled around and over her, sifting through her hair and cooling the sweat from her nape, running over her like a warm massage while he groaned and whispered poems and blessings and curses beneath her. 

She could go on forever like this. She would never, ever get tired.  _ Never _ . “God, I love your cock.”

“And my cock loves you. Bloody hell, Slayer, oh Christ, you’re gorgeous with the moon on you, the wind in your hair like that, fuck, just keep on forever like that…” His thumb slipped down over her belly, petted through her carefully groomed thatch of hair…

She forestalled him with a hand to his wrist. “Wait. I’m loving this. Just a little longer.”

He laid back and groaned again, thrusting up mindlessly, then slowed, twisted his hips a little as he dropped both palms to her hips. “Let me watch you work your nipples some more, then, love. Fuck, that’s…”

She obliged, enjoying the extra pricking of sensation as he rocked up beneath her. “So… you were saying?” she managed after a moment, the words coming out a little broken.

“Nnn… that you get a new bloody… merit badge for calling the wanker… on his bluff, and… Oh, hell,” he gritted. “Oh, Christ… Buffy…” 

“Just a little longer…” Adjusting, she dropped back, settled her palms to his thighs, closed her eyes to feel him striking her g-spot over… and over… and over…  _ God _ that was good. 

Especially when it came coupled with his words. “And?”

“Fuuuck… Next time… We play poker… You get…” He hesitated. “Two…”

She squeezed him viciously, trapping him inside her.

He dug his fingers into her ass and slammed her down onto his hips, hard, reeled up with teeth bared to stare into her eyes in desperation, breathing through his teeth like he was in some special kind of purgatory. 

She lowered her forehead to his. “Three… rounds,” she got out, clenching him rhythmically to make her point. “A… three round… handicap.” She lightly licked his lips… and let him go, for just a moment. “Make me come, Spike.”

She was flipped before she knew what was happening, found herself flat on her back on a chilly, unforgiving, slick-smooth surface as he regained his mental faculties just long enough to recall that movement was an option, and then he had her legs up over his shoulders and his thumb on her clit, was slamming her into next week. With her hips tilted up this high his every stroke battered her clit from the inside while his fingers did their work from without; and it was like she was being driven into some kind of alternate dimension when they were like this. 

Holy damn, she loved this position, and okay, probably only maybe her shoulders and the back of her head were on the ground by now, if that. Hard to tell, since she couldn’t really feel anything right now above her waist, but it didn’t really matter anyway, since everything was already spiraling out of control. 

She had to stay close, couldn’t let him get away before the spiral tightened into… Into…

She dug one hand deep into the soil. Dragged her nails deep under the grass for purchase, found the edge of the grave marker, drove her fingertips underneath, clung. Clawed the other hard into his laboring shoulders, chilled from his own time on the marble, threw her head back. “Fu… uh… uck…”

“No. You. Bloody. Well. Better. Watch. Me. Damn. You. Buffy…”

She wasn’t sure she could. Her vision was hazing out, but she gave it her best effort, dragging her eyes back to him. Mostly she saw darkness, a faint glow that was her guy, his hair blowing wildly in a gust of warm air to complete the fuzzy image… and then he twisted his hips and whispered, “Fucking goddess!” and she was done. Gone. Nothing left. Buffy had left the building.

She was remotely aware that he followed her shortly thereafter, mostly because she was familiar at that point with the sensations of his release… and that it usually took a pretty phenomenal orgasm to have him end up the way he was, draped over her like this with his hand cupping her head and the rest of him sort of one very large, lukewarm vampire noodle. 

“Hey,” she managed after a short eternity, and bumped him a little with her hips. “You gonna dust?”

“Unf.”

She smiled into the nape of his neck. “Eloquent.”

“Mmhm.” With what felt like an enormous effort, he shoved himself up about three inches to obtain the necessary vantage to eye her with one beautiful blue iris, made a noise that sounded like wonder… then flopped over abruptly onto his back next to her. 

/Ugh!/ “Hey, I didn’t say you were allowed to leave!”

He ignored her scolding. “Jesus fuck, Buffy, what you do to me…”

She snorted dismissively at that. “I didn’t do anything to you. I stood in a store and told some gross old guys to pack up and go home…”

“I am going to eat your sweet cunny for a week and a half straight,” he informed her certainly. “Christ, that was incredible. Bloody amazing bint.”

/You’re so nummy./ “Well, now. That sounds like a subject worth discussing.”

“Discussing, hell.” Moving like he was drunk, Spike slithered back over onto his hands and knees, and commenced crawling down her body in that determined way he had that said he intended to spend the rest of the night south of the Mason-Dixon. 

“You know what I love about you?” Buffy murmured dreamily as he settled in between her legs, and let her head loll back to look at the faint spatter of stars a person could actually discern above and to the north of Sunnydale.

“Mmm?” he queried, shoving his arms beneath her legs to cup her butt in his palms—he was a sight warmer than the marble beneath her, which was nice—and commencing his nuzzling intro. “Hello, beauty.”

The weirdo often had whole conversations with her nether regions that had little to nothing to do with the parts of her that could actually answer him. “I love your work ethic,” she informed him, and folded her arms behind her head. 

He snorted—which was a little odd—and gave her a little salutatory sort of lick, which was nice, considering she was still all vibrate-y. “This isn’t work, I’ve no ethics to speak of except that your quim deserves my full devotion every moment I can spare of every day… and you just love how hard and how often I can make you come.”

“Well, that too.” Extricating one hand from behind her head as he settled in, she shoved her fingers into his hair, closed her eyes, and hummed a little, in tune to the purring that had taken up rumbly residence between her thighs. “God, what a way to end the night. See, they’re idiots if they think I’m gonna trade you out. You’re  _ such _ an investment.”

He chuckled, tickled her clit with the tip of his tongue. “Better keep earning my way, then, yeah?” And he did that one thing—which, yes!—that was about ninety percent of his job description, right there. That thing that made her sit up and grab onto his hair with both hands, and pretty soon she would be wrapping her legs around his skull like earmuffs to ensure that he didn’t escape, because… “Just… oh God… keep doing that and I’ll…”

“Mmmhmm!”

“Oh God, Spike! No, wait! Don’t…” The bastard was doing that teasing thing, darting away, coming back. It was his ‘yeah, what’ll you pay me to stay there?’ game. Asshole. “I’ll… I’ll… owe you…” She couldn’t  _ think! _

Luckily a vague debt was good enough for him at the present moment. “Oh, thank  _ God _ …”

He sat back a few minutes later and grinned at her. “Best part about you, Slayer; you always pay out.” And he drew a finger along the wake of his tongue’s path, lifted it, glistening, grinned at her. “Keep a bloke around forever, sure thing like you.” 

“Don’t be a pig,” she managed, still panting.

“Bein’ real. Always nice to know one’s efforts are appreciated.” Smiling fatuously, he lowered himself back into place.

“Oh jeez. You aren’t even giving me a break first before you…”

“Can’t. I’m in the contract now, innit?”

“Oh wow.”

***

“So, what are we gonna do about Glory?”

Spike drew his fingers up along her sides, his cheek conveniently cupped in the curve of her hip. He sighed, trailed the first two fingers of his left hand down along her tummy, cut lightly in along the swale of her flank, drew ticklish circles with the barest brushes of his fingertips at the edges of her patch, which was just under his nose and lips and fluttering ticklishly with his breath. He seemed markedly disinterested in talking business… but he also knew that she wouldn’t be able to relax forever without addressing it, because he knew ‘his bird’, so he walked his fingers back up, poked her a little in her navel, then turned his face to kiss her just above her pubic bone and buried his face there, eyes closed. “We’ll figure something, Slayer,” he murmured, his voice a low drone buzzing pleasantly into her skin. “Still have that big bleedin’ rocket launcher, do you, the Boy stole from the Army base to take out the soddin’ Judge?”

Buffy sifted her hands through his hair; a meditation so instinctive she barely realized she was doing it, then frowned up at the sky. “I mean, I’m down to try it. I’m down to try anything… but the way she blew through that metal door and wasn’t fazed by the factory collapsing and whatever… Do you think even it would hurt her?”

He grunted sourly in response. “Might at least break a nail. And havin’ a building fall on her slowed her crooked arse down a few minutes. Worth a bloody try.”

At least it was a little less humiliating, knowing none of your best shots had had any effect, when you knew your antagonist was an actual god. “Knowing what she is, though… even if all three of us came at her with the big guns… I dunno, I’m just one of those people who feels like… I guess, how could the same solution work twice? It just sounds too easy.” Buffy shrugged as well as she could against the tore-up grass under her shoulders, made a reluctant face. “And, you know, god. Probably we’ll have to rely a lot on magicks this time. Magickal weapons of some kind, huh? Or, like…”

Her vampire’s head popped up from her lap so damned fast it almost made her dizzy, coming unstuck with a faint ripping noise as he stared at her with wild, blue surmise. “We’ve a hammer.”

“Excuse me?”

“Troll hammer. Wasn’t that Oleg bloke a god of some sort? Troll god?”

Buffy pushed up to regard him, interested by this new tack. “Olaf. And… huh.”

“Whatever. Never was formally introduced to the sot.” Spike waved a disinterested hand, dismissing this consideration. “Still have it though, don’t we? And we can both wield it, seemingly.”

Buffy frowned at this, mildly concerned at the imbalance the possibility engendered. “It leaves Faith out.”

He shrugged it off in his turn. “We’ll have the heathens conjure her some other bloody thing, yeah? Earn their keep.”

He was brimming with confidence again, which was a hilarious look considering one whole side of his face from hair to eyebrow was smeared with dried bodily fluids, making him look like he was sporting a new and wildly unlikely punk hairstyle, and had attempted to comb his eyebrow up over his scar. “God, you’re a dope. You’re lucky you’re so smart.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, as if looking for a catch. “Don’t noise about it, yeah?”

Buffy snorted. “Like it’s a big secret anymore?” She nudged his butt with one foot; or, rather, tried, though she mostly got his upper thigh. “Speaking of… are you gonna give Lydia an interview before Watchers Incorporated leave town? That girl would probably have an orgasm just to talk to you for ten minutes.”

The much-amended eyebrow shot up with interest. “Oh, yeah? Think I should give the bird a thrill, do you?”

“Bet she doesn’t get a lot of ‘em, working for Quentin Travers. She deserves a dose of William the Bloody. And you’d get to be all theatrical. I know you miss having some mystery.”

He eyed her for a second, all calculation, then his expression completely deflated and he exhaled heavily. Shifting up onto his butt, he scooted up between her legs and flopped an arm over his knees. “It’s unfair that I’m so bloody transparent to you, pet.”

“Okay, because you can’t read me like a damn book?”

He lifted the other, less messy brow. “That’s supposed to be  _ my _ special talent. When the hell did you catch up, anyway?”

Buffy tried a smug look. “I happen to like to study you.”

“Well… fuck.”

Grinning, Buffy sat up the rest of the way to poke him in the shoulder. “Give her an interview. Mix up a bunch of truth and fantasy and see whether she can spot any of the seams. It’ll be a fun game for you. Like a little mini-vacation. ‘Spike on tour’. Like selling yourself out as an attraction for a Watcher theme park, except you’ll get to smell her being all turned on the whole time, and know you’re screwing up their official books while you’re at it, and affecting a bunch of scholarship, and setting the story straight a little while you’re at it…” She squeezed his knee when he stared at her in amazement. “And I bet you could even barter for it. Charge her by the half-hour or something, and make bank. Win-win.”

He was staring at her in awe now. It gave her the wig. “What?”

“You’re a sodding goddess. And if I live fifty years with you, pet, I’ll never cease being shocked and amazed by you.”

Something warm flowed through her, bubbling like champagne. “Oh? Well… good. That’s good. I’d hate for you to get bored.” Since even though she doubted she’d live long enough for it to happen, him getting bored with her was one of her biggest fears. 

That, and him getting disgusted with her if she ever did live long enough to, like, age and stuff, but that was a whole other saga of issues.

He was watching her with narrowed eyes now, his expression altered to one of tongue-clicking calculation. “Would you wanna be there, then?”

“What, while you screw with Lydia’s head?” Buffy shrugged idly, turned away a little to pluck a few inoffensive blades of crushed, smooshed grass and toss them aside. “I’ll probably hang around close by; you know, to make sure none of them try to off you or anything, trying to protect her. But I wouldn’t want to get in the way of your game.” Lifting her eyes to meet his, she locked onto his gaze for a thoughtful moment. “Unless you think she’ll be more comfy with me on hand to, you know, ‘keep her safe’.” She did air-quotes as she said it to let Spike know she thought it was a stupidly unnecessary idea.

Spike dismissed that with a flick of one hand. “Nah. Let her be anxious. It adds a fillip to the interaction.”

Buffy lifted a brow of her own at that, rolled her eyes at him. “Don’t tell me. You miss ‘smelling fear’ on people.”

His expression cleared to something affronted. “Alright, look. I don’t get to hunt anymore. Fear makes the blood taste better. I get to be around her all jumpy and turned on for an hour or so, then maybe after that I go have a nice bite somewhere, then I come back, maybe we have a shag… Put it all together and it sounds like the hell of a night, yeah?”

Buffy dropped her face into her hand, shook her head heavily. “Vampires…”

He shoved her a little roughly with his shoulder. “Hey. You don’t get to say a soddin’ thing, pet. Vampires make you hot.”

“Yeah, well, apparently I’m twisted like that.” Spoken into her hand, it sounded even worse an admission.

When she lifted her face from her palm he was grinning at her. He made a grab for her hips, tugged her into his lap. “Welcome to the club, my love.”

“What? Because Slayers make you hot? This is not new information.” She let the challenge lie there, spoken three inches from his face, aware her eyes were hot on his.

He leaned back a little to eye her warily. “Oh, you’re just waitin’ for the chance to sock me on the beak if I answer that one wrong, aren’t you? You think I’m that bleedin’ stupid? One.  _ One _ Slayer gets me hot, love…”

“Liar. But I’ll settle for knowing that I get you the hottest, and that I get to be the one who enjoys all the proceeds.”

He canted his hips forward at that so that his cock was pressed firmly against her naked bits, drew his fingers down along her cheek, eyes intense on hers. “Always. And you couldn’t not. You’re like the sun, Buffy.” His fingers trailed down, over her jaw, her throat, her collarbone, before his eyes drifted back to hers. “You’re the center of my universe.”

It was tough being the center of someone’s universe… but it was also everything she had ever needed. To be loved like that was the source of a kind of strength she had never known she could earn, much less keep. “It scares me sometimes, to know you love me that much.”

Leaning away again, he propped himself on one elbow and tilted his head to lay his cheek on her knee, gazed at her adoringly. And if she was his sun, his eyes were the sky where she rested. “You deserve it, Buffy.”

***

The Council pranced off back to the UK for ‘the hols’, thank goodness, which meant the locals could finally settle in for Christm-ukk-kwanz-ah. Sunnydale got back to normal—or whatever counted as normal for the hellmouth—as both humans and demons returned to station-keeping. Which, for both populations, included a lot of madness in the shopping department, and in the case of the demons, a whole bunch of trying to get themselves back together so the community could resume life as usual post-Council interference. 

Apparently there had been a little more in-depth prodding going on down on that side of the tracks than Buffy had been aware at first. She was actually kind of a little sad that none of the regulars had taken the leap of faith to inform her all that was going on; that even after a year’s slow-building relationship and mutual reliance, they had all still assumed that if the Council was in town flipping tables and invading homes, she must have known about it and okayed it.

The upshot was, even after the jerks left, the locals were edgy around her for a while; pretty much till she, with Spike’s and Anya’s backing, managed to convince at least the majority of them that the little visit from the tweedies hadn’t been her idea, and that moreover she had done everything within her power to send them packing. In fact, things still remained a bit uneasy for a while when it came to Slayer-demon relations, which sucked. There was a feeling of sort of ‘maybe they’ll even start weighing their options when a chance comes to run something behind my back’; which was a sense she hadn’t gotten from the local population for almost half a year. 

Dammit, those bastards had set her back  _ months _ .

The work they had to put in to get things back on an even keel meant that she and Spike enjoyed a  _ very _ truncated ‘anniversary’ evening in the crypt, though Spike did do a pretty nice job of making her feel adored, giving her flowers and loving her insensible so that she had to kind of tussle with him for the chance to do the same in her turn. 

She also ended up putting in doubles during her finals and her winter break from school trying to keep an eye on things and earn back everyone’s trust while avoiding their thinking she was policing them too much and fulfilling their stereotype. Not so much in her game-plan for the holidays. Not especially when it was all hands on deck on the other side of things as well.

Everyone took shifts at the Magic Box during the same period, as Giles and Jonathan were inundated with last-minute shoppers. After all, Anya was torn between stores, since as per usual for that time of year, the gallery got kind of slammed as well. It was pretty much Mom’s best season for sales, which meant she and Anya were jumping on it while they had the chance, to the point that Mom got so overwhelmed right before Christmas she even wangled Buffy into taking a shift.

Heck, she somehow even fast-talked  _ Spike _ into one. William the Bloody, standing around in a gallery, selling art, or at least pretending to. It was both utterly ludicrous—and probably something he’d never live down for the rest of his long unlife, whether the gallery was known to be friendly to the locals or no—and an indication that their vampire would literally set himself on fire for Joyce Summers.

Either that, or it was proof that the world was coming to an end on Christmas. Which, considering Buffy’s previous experiences, wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility. For one thing, watching her guy get into deep discussions with a possible buyer on the relative merits of two different paintings, both of which, to Buffy’s eyes at least, had no visible value whatsoever, since they were all just a bunch of shapes and primary colors and splatters and whatever, was just, like… buh?

Buffy herself was hopeless at art-selling. She didn’t get any of it. She found all of it fairly incomprehensible, except maybe the photographs, and a few of the more obvious paintings—landscapes and stuff—and would probably rather deal with her thorny, impossible demon-management issue. Because, look. She wasn’t going to spend a half an hour ranting with someone about ‘composition’ or whatever. /If you like the thing, buy the thing, right? Why have a mutual dissertation about it first?/ 

She manned the register and called it good. Mostly she refrained from talking people out of buying stuff, working off of the ‘if  _ Anya _ , of all people, can sell stuff, so can I’ model. She focused on staying pleasant, nodded and smiled and tried hard to sound enthused with them when they gushed about their finds… and prayed for her shifts to be over so she could go slay something… or, heck. Even debate the finer points of trading illicit venoms with someone scaled and dripping ooze. 

Spike, meanwhile, actually seemed like he enjoyed himself in the one or two shifts he picked up, walking out of the store with her later babbling something about some trip he’d made to a museum in Berlin in the thirties, and thank god no one ever ate Picasso, because even if he was nuts, look what he brought to the world, and, “I’ve been round the whole bloody world, Buffy,” he told her at the end of his little rant. “Seen damn near everything. And you? You’re a Bronzino.” Halting before the door, one hand out to open it for her, he lightly brushed her cheek with awe stealing over his face in the lamplight from the darkened street. “Lit from within, perfect and glowing…”

“Oh, God,” Mom called from the back of the room, “Buffy, for God’s sake, don’t ever let him get away, please. I almost had a heart attack just now, and I’m only a secondhand witness…”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Oh, jeez. Get a room, you two.”

Leaning forward, Spike brushed her lips with his. “Rather get a room with you.”

“Sweet-talker.”

“Besides; we have some Christmas shopping to do, innit?”

Buffy blinked. “We do?”

“Yeah.”

Buffy’s heart started to trip along at a mile-a-minute. Was this an invitation to go shop for that one thing for him? Were they about to go to the one naughty store he had mentioned in the demon part of town? Kr’vd’s?

She was amazed—and maybe more than a hair let down—when instead he pulled the DeSoto into park in front of, of all places, the mall. “Wh…”

“Know you haven’t had the chance to get gifts for everyone yet, innit? It’s been weighing on you. And you love to shop, pet.” His eyes twinkled at her in the low light of the parking lot. “And since you’ve come into a bit of money, finally…” He tilted his head toward the big-box store across the lot, gleaming in welcome. “You deserve a bit of, what’s the phrase? Retail therapy.”

He was right. The Council had handed over a stipend-thinger to her and Faith before leaving town—Spike had called it ‘a nice bit of pocket-change’—which meant she could actually, like,  _ shop _ now, without feeling incredibly guilty for spending Mom’s money, or tuition money, and worrying she’d starve because it was part of her room-and-board fund. What a thought!

Of course, when she thought of going shopping, she tended to think of that as a thing she would do with Wil, or Dawnie, or once upon a time, Cordelia… or even  _ Xander _ , but not… “What’ll you do while I’m… in my therapy session?” she asked, dumbfounded by his easy declaration. “Stand around outside and smoke?” Not that she could easily shop  _ for _ her friends with them there, but still.

He jerked his head once in quick negation. “Once upon a time I knew my place as the baggage-handler when a woman of mine went on a whirlwind spree. No doubt I’ll pick it up again quick enough.”

/Ooookaaay./ Buffy didn’t even want to ask if that was a William-lifetime thing, or a running around with Drusilla while she stole stuff and ate people thing. “So, let me get this straight. I shop and you carry?”

He drew out a cigarette, reached for his door-handle. “Going once…”

“Okay, okay!” She scrambled for hers. “I accept!” 

As he paced placidly at her side along the incredibly lengthy carrel of vehicles toward the sliding doors of Nordstroms enjoying his pre-doom cigarette, Buffy reflected that this might actually be a lot of fun. “You know, I have a present in mind for you, too,” she told him quietly as he finished his cigarette and they closed with the entrance. “I didn’t find it in time for your birthday. Not sure if I’ve found the right one yet to give it to you for Christmas, though. It might have to wait for your other birthday.” She had been to every store in town that might remotely sell Zippos, and thus far had located not a one that had seemed good enough to replace the one he’d lost. Most of them were stupidly, childishly flashy, for one thing, with, like, dumb cartoon dragons on them, or advertising football teams or whatever; that, or they were completely plain, but kind of made of weird, thin metal that felt cheap. 

She was starting to think that maybe she was making this too big in her head, and she should just get him one and get over it, though. Did it have to be such a huge deal? /If I wait too long, he’ll probably ruin it and just get himself one. Which… why  _ hasn’t _ he yet?/ It almost made it worse, like, how important _ was _ the other one? Was it some kind of nostalgia thing? Was it irreplaceable? 

Pondering that question really might just end up sending her down a rabbit-hole; but then, that was part of the reason she hadn’t bought him a new one yet, either. Clearly it was a big deal, or he would’ve already done the honors himself, so… /And, dammit, I can’t ask him what about the last one was so special, to see what I’m up against, because if I do, he’ll know what I’m planning. This is a catch22./

Stubbing out his butt on the nearest pillar, Spike flicked it into the trash can at its base and narrowed his eyes at her. “No need to be so bloody cryptic, pet. Unless it’s all a ploy to get me to play twenty questions with you.”

“No,” Buffy murmured, pensive. “Just trying to decide if I should settle, or what the hell I could get for you if I don’t.”

Pushing away from the pillar with one elbow quirked out in her direction, he shot her a broadly suggestive smirk. “Some of the best gifts are ephemeral and involve the kindly application of a beautiful mouth and Slayer strength…”

Buffy rolled her eyes as she took his arm. “Sex addict.”

“Guilty.”

Shopping with Spike turned out to be a trip and a half. He squired her around all over the whole damn mall and back without complaint, and even, to her amazement, made game comments with her about color and fit of various sweaters and shirts and stuff when she dithered over what to get people. “Not sure that one’d look right on Harris, pet. ‘S all wrong for his eyes. I’d go with the earthier one. Better for his coloring, yeah?” Or even, “Here’s one with loads of bitty pockets inside. Think Red and Glinda might like ‘em? Might hold all sorts of vials of herbs and the like while they gallivant about with spells an’ things tucked away just so…”

He actually seemed to be enjoying himself, and wow. These gifts were so going to end up coming from the both of them, and… And…

This was the first time she was going to get to give presents from an ‘us’ rather than just ‘from Buffy’.

As if recognizing that fact belatedly himself, Spike surprised her at one point when out of nowhere he laid his hand on the counter of The Earth Emporium before she could step up, and dug in his pocket. “I’ve got this one, pet.”

“Okay. You, um, sure?”

“Yeah.”

He also paid for the little vase they picked out for Mom.

They invited Clem over to the house for Christmas, with Mom’s blessing, but he surprised them when he informed them that he had another place to be. “Oh, wow. Thanks, Slayer. Really. But I gotta bail anyway. Got family up in San Francisco; gotta make it up the coast in time for the shindig. You know, shake some skin, see if anyone picks me this year to carry…”

“Car…”

Spike jerked his head once, quickly, to cut off her query before she asked too many questions.

“…Maybe make a special friend or two. There was this one third cousin. Or maybe fourth cousin? Couple of removes. You know, who keeps track anymore after first cousins? Anyway, we really hit it off when we were younger, so who knows?”

Buffy opened her mouth, horrified, and shut it again when Spike stomped painfully on her instep. Instead she managed to hug Clem, pat him on the back, wish him well on his trip, remind him not to forget his box of Fiddle Faddle for the journey, and send him on his way with a smile. “Just what,” she hissed, rounding on Spike after he left the crypt, “was  _ that _ about?”

“Didn’t want you stickin’ your foot in it is all, Slayer,” her vampire answered, moving to the couch to toss the blanket over the back and take a seat. He sniffed a little at the arm of the sofa and sighed. “Whole bloody thing smells of Clem’s arse now. Hell.”

“My… What… What is he maybe gonna carry, anyway? And who has… I mean, who hooks up with their… with their  _ cousins?” _

“Eggs.”

Buffy blinked, thrown. 

“After they’re produced, Loose-Skinned males carry the eggs under their skin-folds, in specialty pouches to be fertilized while they’re still permeable, and till they’re strong enough to be given back to the females to be tended and polished and the like for the last little bit so they can hatch. And since the females are busy producing eggs for the first bit, the males all go off together to tend each other’s skin and that sort of thing before they go off to be egg-carriers; scratch mutual itches and the like. The females do the same for each other after they’ve produced the eggs from out of the skin-folds, and the males are stuck being prone for weeks.” 

He shrugged then, and lit a cigarette. “Clem’ll be gone for a coupla months, since no doubt after he’s done incubating and is relieved of duty, he’ll want to run amok again with his lads.” Pulling in a drag from his smoke, he eyed Buffy with a pointed brow. “Not every species works the way humans do when it comes to sex, love… And when you only have so many members of your species about, you’re likely to be related to most of the ones nearby, so it’s not fair to judge a bloke for gettin’ frisky with relatives; especially when it’s a species as can’t produce young from having a bit of good, clean, sensual fun from it.”

Buffy quite literally had nothing to say to that; mostly because she could in no way wrap her brain around the concept of mating that involved… shifting eggs from one set of skin-folds to another, and had no real touchy-feelies involved. “So… there’s no real… contact required to… um…”

“Most Loose-Skinneds are socially gay, love, or at least that’s how we’d classify them. Not that what they do really counts as sex in our books. They don’t even have the equipment. But yeah. When you get right down to it, egg-laying species in general don’t have a particular need for shagging, innit; or really, for spending all that much time with the opposite sex unless it’s spawning season, yeah?”

“Oh. I mean, I guess I just never really… thought about…” She couldn’t even cope with this. “So they’re, what? Like salmon?”

He shrugged, eyes not quite meeting hers, and looked a bit uncomfortable. “They’re not the only species to separate sex from reproduction, pet. When you get right down to it, sex isn’t particularly necessary to vamps, either.” He grinned provocatively at her. “It’s the hell of a nice pastime, but with us, the blood  _ is _ the sex. ‘S how we make new vamps, how we feed… It’s just, since we used to be human, we still have this vestigial human sexuality as part of our recessive natures, and it gets excited by that experience, so the two get conflated.” 

He cut his eyes away from hers then; probably so that he didn’t have to see the flinch, the distaste that odd crossing of boundaries would elicit in a human, much less a Slayer. “‘S why most vamps end up shagging our offspring. Haven’t done it, but I have felt the draw, can imagine how much like getting off it must feel, to have someone pullin’ from you to fill themselves, when the bit of them that’s human is leaving, goin’ on the long walk, and the bit of you that’s a demon is rushing into them to fill them; when they’re desperate for it, because they’re empty. It’d be a rushing, shared, penetrative act. The ultimate climax of feeding, because it’s an exchange, rather than just taking without getting anything back, and you’re perpetuating the species. There’s a drive there.” A short shrug. “Like with anyone, I guess, in the moment.”

/Oh my God…/ Buffy hadn’t even thought about it. Had tried hard not to.

Spike had paused briefly, and… Oh god, he was turned on. / Oh God./ Buffy couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t… acknowledge the part of him that could… want that. 

She caught it, though, when he shook his head, as if coming up from underwater. Dismissing it, in the face of her clear horror. “Any road, explains, doesn’t it, why this lot here keeps doin’ it without thought, like a load of teens gettin’ off round a campfire during a kegger, without thought to what they’d do with the soddin’ proceeds, yeah? They pay no mind to whether they mean to raise the fledge they’ve made, or even if they have it in them to try.” And then, as if casting something aside, he exhaled hard, shrugged again, this time dismissively. “But as to the rest…” She caught the faintly derisive, even amused edge to his voice, his ‘vibe’. “…The sex part is secondary, and it’s in no way required for anything that we do.” 

Buffy was far more than taken aback—hell, she was more than a little grossed out—and really, did they have to segue into vamp-biology? She could have happily stuck to talking about Clem’s species, rather than wandering so close to home, and the whole Loose-Skinned reproduction thing had been ew enough. /God, what does he want me to say?/ 

She opened her mouth. Closed it when she realized she had nothing whatsoever to say that wouldn’t have sounded either incredibly bad or incredibly dumb. Shook her head and just sat down, probably a little too heavily, on the arm of the old olive sofa, a careful two feet away from him. And perked on it for a few minutes, because that was always safer when you had Buffy-skills and didn’t want to come out with a truly awful word-salad.

Spike always had a reason when he brought up a subject from out of nowhere like this. He didn’t just say things to say them. Which meant she’d do well to feel her way into this conversation with care. Maybe start with a joke? “Um… No comment on the whole, um… making vamp-babies thing, but, um… the sex being unnecessary deal? That’s kind of amazing, you know, considering how damn good you are at it.” She tried for light, hoped it would bridge the gap a little. She knew the attempt would fall flat before she issued it, but she also knew he’d take it in the spirit it was given. He would know she was buying time to wrap her brain around the reality of his bland statements; which was, in retrospect, obvious, but it was still a lot, considering her long-term, human-centric model.

“Tryin’ to butter me up, I see,” Spike answered, and he leaned back a little, something relaxing slightly in his posture. But for all that his eyes were now drilling into hers, she couldn’t feel him very well in the current moment. He was holding himself back from her in that unnerving way he had; had kind of… retracted his ‘feel’ from her; probably right about when he’d realized she was picking up on his automatic arousal over the whole dissertation about making fledges thing. 

He wanted to stay on task, didn’t want whatever else to distract from the conversation. Which meant he definitely had a reason for his whole segue into vamp-biology.

Great. This was An Important Conversation (tm). 

Might as well just ask right out, save herself the trouble. “Uh… why are we discussing this right now?”

He lifted a shoulder, dropped it casually. “Guess I wanted you to know… when I’m with you, you’re…” He paused, hesitated. Gave a little nod. “I’ve always been a bit odd for a vamp. You know that. I retained a bit of a need for… more than just touch, in any form. For loving touch, if you will.” He looked away again, lost that incisive gaze for a moment. “Maybe it’s a part of just the man in me what didn’t get it in life and wanted it. Who the bloody hell knows. But I think… maybe that perversion kept it alive in me. That yearning; for more than just sharing blood.” His eyes lifted once more to lock on hers, cobalt and depthless. “Wanted you to know that… yeah. Having what we have now? That you let me take your blood, and that you want to do the same; that means everything to me, as a demon. But even if we’d never done that, I was, and would continue to be there with you. One hundred percent, down to the core of me…” His tones turned unshakable. “…Because you’ve reawoken the man, and you satisfy something in me that never had been. Not in a hundred-fifty years. Even if bein’ with you, bein’ loved by you wakes the blood-lust in me, it’s always overpowered, Buffy, by knowing that by some miracle, you want me. That you would touch me with a loving hand… and I wouldn’t trade that in a thousand years for just sharing blood with you and having none of the rest.”

“Oh.” Nodding, Buffy looked away, down into her hands. “I know that.”

“Long as you do.”

She really wasn’t sure why he was bringing it up now. She knew he wasn’t saying he felt some kind of crazed, sexual urge to sire her. He would never want that. Not after… what happened with his mother. He’d be afraid she’d freak out on him, hate him. And he knew she’d hate it, so the likelihood that she’d hate him for doing it was pretty damn high. 

/Not to mention that he’s really into our temperature difference. Like woah./ 

No, that wasn’t the issue here. 

Was he saying… “Do… Do you want to stop?” she asked in a small voice. “Because… they might try to kill you again? I mean, I know being mated to me means you’re in danger, and we can’t undo it, but I guess maybe they’ll be happier if it gets all… thinned out the way it did over time because Angel couldn’t…”

“What?” Spike’s voice went sharp with astonishment. “What the bloody hell are you on about, Buffy?”

Caught by the edge in his tones, Buffy let it jerk her eyes up. “Well, I don’t know!” she exclaimed, starting to get kind of upset now. “You start babbling about how we’re different, and then you tell me you’d be just as happy if we weren’t doing the bitey-thing, and you’re all cut off from me right now so I can’t feel you, and they just tried to…”

“Oh, Christ,” Spike exclaimed, and lunging up, he grabbed her by the shoulder of her jean jacket and dragged her down onto his lap. 

She landed with a startled thump and started struggling, because look; no one had asked to be unceremoniously plunked around without permission by a handsy demon, and she was in the middle of feeling seriously confused, and maybe even mad, and definitely hurt, and… “Hey! Listen, buster!”

She was cut off by a palm over her mouth. Her eyes bulged in outrage. “Shut your gob, Buffy, before you get yourself into an even bigger snarl. You’re talking nonsense.” And then the hand was gone and she was being kissed, and now she was definitely pissed off. 

She gave him a shove that should have sent him sprawling. Except that he was hanging onto her, so it accomplished very little. “You’re lucky I didn’t just bite your hand, you asshole.”

“Yeah, well, no one said I was smart. Or good. Evil, right?” Shaking his head, he tilted it, watched her with glittering eyes, then pressed it to her forehead. “Bloody hell. Trust you to get it all wrong, love. Christ. I just wanted you to know that I’d love you either-or. That I didn’t have to have you this way to stay with you forever. That the bastards were wrong, and you’d have me no matter what, and it isn’t the blood keeps me here serving you. That I’m yours, love, no matter how it panned out between us. Not sure how you got from that to thinkin’ I wanted to take back the biggest miracle of my entire bloody existence…”

He wasn’t making any sense. She was whirling now, couldn’t hold all the twists and turns and sudden sharp bends in her head. “I just wanna be happy,” Buffy told him, feeling all weepy, “and it’s almost my birthday again, and…”

Spike groaned and rolled her over underneath him in a move not unlike that of an alligator dunking its prey underwater, except he was busy drowning her in kisses. “You… Slayer…” he informed her between reassurances, “are… the… barmiest… most… maddening… chit… in… the… bloody… universe…”

She broke free for a second to glare at him. “Look who’s talking, you jerk.”

He grinned, and tugged her back into his arms, held her hard enough that she almost couldn’t breathe. So that she could feel safe. “Asshole enough to want to keep you forever. Can’t be rid of me, remember? When are you gonna stop bein’ scared of losing me, you nit?”

Buffy sighed into his neck. “Oh, probably never. Does it help if I trust you to stick around more than I’ve ever trusted anyone in my life?”

He nipped her neck, making her breath catch, and held her there; just flesh held between blunt teeth, but enough to speed her heart rate and to feel as if she was firmly, violently, vividly real, and there and secure in  _ his _ vibrant, real, certain  _ thereness _ . And when he released her… “I’ll take it.” The emotion he felt at her words, her response, flooded her being as he opened to her. 

And if he needed to ask why she needed their exchanges just as much as he did, he had his answer.

***

The subject of vampire breeding became apropos when they got word of what was going down in LA. Which, luckily held off for them till shortly after a very convivial Christmas at the Summers home, in which there was much cheer, good food, excellent prezzies, and liberal love to be spread around the room (seasoned by Willow and Jonathan, fresh from a Hanukkah feast at his family home with Tara, talking amongst themselves about things Jewish and laughing together). 

Literally the next day, a day that Giles and Spike both insisted on calling ‘boxing day’, whatever the hell that meant, Faith got a call from a seriously freaked Cordelia.

Apparently, somehow, completely inexplicably, Darla was back. Drusilla had… resurrected her? Or Wolfram and Hart had, to screw with Angel, but they’d only resurrected her human-side, except her human-side still remembered and loved Angel, which… how did that work? And then Dru had sired her again, which… talk about weird family dynamics, because that meant that Angel’s sire and her grandsire and Spike’s great-grandsire was now Spike’s… sister and Angel’s grandchilde? 

It was too weird. Buffy couldn’t even with vampire nest relations. Anyway, Darla had a new demon, if a related one, that was still somehow in love with Angel (or maybe she was just always Darla, but the demon was really just a removal of something, not an addition? No, that didn’t make any sense, and just, who even knew anymore?) 

Anyway, the two vamp-girls were on a rampage through LA… and Angel had gone rogue. He hadn’t lost his soul or anything. He’d just… decided to hearken to his dark-side without even the benefit of sex or anything, and was busy ignoring his friends and the ‘helpless’ he was supposed to be helping; all of it, to stalk around the city doing insane things because he was so hurt and upset that human-Darla was re-sired, so angry at Wolfram and Hart, so… lost. ‘I don’t even  _ know _ anymore,’ Cordy told them over the phone. ‘I don’t know if he’s coming back from this. It’s one thing if it’s a soul thing, you know? When that happens you can just stake him or find a way to stuff the thing back in so he has his leash on. But now… He still  _ has _ the soul, but it’s not working. But it’s not like we can give him  _ another _ one! And if the soul’s not enough, what  _ is? _ And we can’t stake him if he’s got it, can we? Or can we? I mean…’

“People with souls lose hope and become awful all the time, Cordelia,” Buffy reminded the other girl bleakly. /And I guess I should’ve realized that Angel was a ticking time-bomb, considering. All that regret, and being tortured, and the depression the soul caused him, and all that. I mean, how much can a person stand?/

What did Jenny’s family expect, anyway? Were they  _ trying _ to turn him right back into Angelus? Because if you torture someone enough, they’ll end up being their worst self anyway, soul or no soul, right? “Sometimes all that needs to happen,” she heard herself finish, “is something has to push ‘em over the edge.” Like watching an evil law firm resurrect a newly-human version of the sire you’d loved and also resented for making you what you were, the person you’d lived and reveled and shared everything with for a hundred-plus years, and then talk your kid into re-siring her out of revenge, essentially killing her again right before your eyes just to torture you. 

And, dammit, if she had ever needed any proof that Angel was the same guy as Angelus, soul or no soul, this was it. /The soul just makes him feel bad about the stuff he did. It never stopped him from doing it. Like when he was with me. All the things he did with me. He was still…/

Not that it was all about her, but it was still tough to really have it driven home this way. 

It also kind of put them into a tailspin as far as how to handle things here at home, and how to also maybe help out with the shitstorm going down in LA. “Maybe I should go talk to the git,” Spike volunteered shortly. “Knock some sense into him. It’s a family matter, after all, and likely you’ll need Faith here in case the crooked-arsed bitch shows her face again…”

“You’re the only one who can use the hammer, aside from me,” Buffy pointed out flatly. “And anyway, if Angel and me are testy these days, you and Angel are  _ way _ worse. You’ll probably just set him off…”

Spike shrugged. “Just thought, since it’s family business…”

Buffy caught his arm. “That’s the problem. He might even talk you into going after these Wolfram and Hart jerks. Because whether you’re super tight or not, they’re your  _ family _ .” /And I need you here taking care of this one, with me./

He flinched away, not looking at her, and tensed up to the consistency of a boulder. Dammit. “Not that I think you love them the way you love mom and Dawn,” she went on, grinding it home, “but you have a loyalty that goes back a hundred and twenty years, and they messed with that. If he started in on you…” /Dammit, Spike,  _ look _ at me!/ “Can you tell me that you would for sure be able to say no when he demanded that you help him get revenge?”

A short, sharp jerk of the head, and words bitten off like they were being chewed. “He hasn’t a hold on me anymore, pet.”

Fair enough, but… But the habit still existed. If anyone knew the kind of hold Angel had over people, the way he could manipulate… And he’d had twenty-plus years to work on Spike, not just three. Not to mention that she knew that whatever his protestations, Spike had both hated and also, obscurely, loved and idolized Angel. He’d reveled in his vampire family, mourned its demise. Most of his resentment against his grandsire came not from the things they had done to each other within the nest--that was just vamp stuff, just the way it went--but due to the fact that Angel and Darla had left the younger set to their own devices, after. 

And then there was the most deciding factor of all, which was… “Dru’s there.”

He flinched so hard at that that she felt it like a physical blow. When he swiveled to stare at her, his eyes were red-rimmed and hard. He looked… Oh, damn. He looked  _ betrayed _ . “She’s no hold on me anymore either, Buffy,” he answered, and his tones, his feel told her that she should  _ know _ that. That she had deeply hurt him by even suggesting…

She just watched him, waiting. Because it wasn’t all about blood-bonds and their accompanying weight, and they both knew it. He had spent over a century loving Drusilla. On top of that… Spike was an intensely loyal person. And then there was the fact that when it came to demonic impulse. When the opportunity presented itself to tear into humans who he could chastely tell himself were in some way evil, maybe had it coming, maybe she might excuse him the lapse… And on top of  _ that _ , these particular humans had very deeply screwed with persons for whom he had held a longstanding, blood-loyalty, and wouldn’t she forgive him that?

The moment hung between them, fraught. When it broke, Spike cracked along with it. Turned away from her with a heavy exhalation that sounded like defeat. And he nodded, eyes on the far wall, mouth tight and hard.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” she told him softly. “It’s that I don’t want you to have to test yourself. It’s not fair to you to pit one set of loyalties against another. Or one set of instincts.”

He nodded again, though he didn’t trust himself to speak.

Well. They would talk about it later. Not here, in mixed company. 

Buffy turned back to Faith. “Do you think you can go find him, slap some sense into him, and get back quick? I have no idea what’s gonna happen with this whole Glory thing. She’s had her head down since we beat up her pet snake, but that doesn’t mean…”

Faith frowned at that, looking torn. “I’m not sure I should go. I mean, yeah, the guy’s maybe going off the rails a little, but so what? Yeah, he’s not talking to the team down there, and he’s off plotting to screw with the boys in suits a little. So what? I mean, it’s not like he’s murdering people left and right, right? And you’re dealing with a freaking  _ god _ , B. I’d say Sunnydale still has priority.”

Buffy blinked, then nodded slowly. She really hadn’t thought that Faith… “Are you sure?”

“Hey.” Grinning in that lazy, sultry way of hers, she nodded with her chin. “I got plans in this town. I figure I can still get a good two, three hard rides out of my cowboy from Florida, for one thing…”

“Oh, jeez…”

Faith begged off with Cordy for a little while longer, letting her know she’d make tracks down to LA if things got worse, or Angel didn’t come back with his tail between his legs within the next few weeks. And then… they waited. They dealt with the daily—or, rather, nightly—workings of the hellmouth. Things remained situation-normal. Nothing really interesting happened. Glory remained oddly quiescent… which pissed Faith off no end, since obviously they had no idea how to locate the creature to bring the fight to her. The other Slayer really wanted her chance to throw down with the misplaced god. 

Before she got her opportunity, though, they were gifted with another call from down south. 

Faith met them up at campus one day—or, rather, met Buffy, shortly after her return to classes after winter break. Buffy was just coming back from an hour or so spent wrangling a second draft out of a crappy Anth essay down at the computer lab. When she got to her dorm room, she found Faith sitting on “Wil’s bed” (Wil had officially put in to stay her ‘roommate’ so that Buffy could keep the room without moving, but to all intents and purposes she had pretty much moved in with Tara). The bed was denuded of all but a sheet and bare pillow, the shelves and desk space held nothing but an old paperback and a couple of wads of crumpled up loose-leaf, though there was still a poster on the wall next to the closet.

On the naked bed Faith had her head down, elbows on her knees, hands propping up her skull. She looked like she had a headache. Spike leaned against the ‘entryway’ wall with his arms and legs crossed, watching her, wordless, while they waited for Buffy to return. “O…kay,” Buffy murmured as she closed the door behind her. “What happened?”

Faith looked up, dropped her arms, made a face. “Oh, you know, every damn thing.” She was holding a cigarette, clearly desperate to go smoke it, though she was kindly holding off on puffing away at the thing inside the room; probably because Spike had informed her that if she lit up in there Buffy would murder her even if the smoke alarm didn’t go off and get her thrown out. After all, if he was not exempt, she sure the hell wouldn’t be. “Cordelia called again. I guess I have to make a quick jaunt back down to LA after all, and just hope our queen bitch here doesn’t make a reappearance without me.” Leaning back on one hand, she pinned Buffy with a hard look. “If something goes down with her and I’m not here, I’m counting on you to stall, B. I wanna get in on the action, okay?”

Buffy felt something cold skitter down her spine to her belly as she moved to take a seat on her bed. “What did he do?” And she held her breath, because really, with Angel, it could be anything.

Faith snorted lightly and twiddled her unlit cigarette between her fingers. “Girl, tall dark and fangy’s gone right the fuck off the deep end.” With a sigh, she jittered a little and shot a glance over at the cheap glass with their dusty blinds. “You sure I can’t smoke this in here if I stand by the window?”

Spike didn’t sound all that impressed. “Do it and she’ll fuck you up, Faith.” Shaking his head, he pushed off, away from the in-room sink to settle himself next to Buffy. “We already knew the bastard was off his trolley. Whyzat mean you suddenly have to run back to give him a spanking?”

Faith made a mirthless sort of sound… but her eyes weren’t nearly as complacent as her voice. “Because apparently he locked a bunch of Wolfram and Hart lawyers in a room with Darla and Drusilla and left them there to be vamp-munchies.” She shook her head at Buffy’s drop-jawed shock. “Which, you gotta admit, is a little beyond the pale for a guy who still has his soul intact.” 

“He  _ what?” _

“Yeah. Even worse, I guess now he’s just letting those two kind of tear up LA; or, if he’s trying to stop ‘em, the crew down there can’t seem to tell, ‘cause he’s not even talking to ‘em anymore…” 

/Oh God, oh shit…/ That Angel could do something like that when he still had his soul was…

It was…

Faith looked away. She sounded resigned. “Even Wes is freaked, and those two had serious simpatico.” She shrugged and leaned back on both hands, unlit smoke held carefully aloft between two fingers. “I need to bring his ass in, whether I can help him or not.”

Buffy found her voice with an effort. “Do you want me to go with you?” Bringing in Angel when he had a rage-on was a seriously tall order, especially when he was acting soulless, and  _ definitely _ if you didn’t have a plan for what the hell to do with him afterward.

Faith’s response was immediate; a light blowing-off. “Nah. I’m just gonna go see what’s the what for a few. See if I can corner the dick, find out what his big damn issue is.” She gave a little shrug. “I’ll call you if I need backup with him, but honestly, you two are like oil and water when he’s going off, you know?”

“Yeah,” Buffy admitted, and fought to breathe. “You were always better at talking each other down.” It was a fair assessment.

Faith nodded, let her gaze fall across the two of them… and pushed herself to her feet. “I’ll head out. Just wanted to let you guys know where I disappeared to, and why.” And then she tried a grin, nodded with her chin. “Don’t let Graham get away, huh? I want him available when I come back. I’ll probably need to blow off steam.” And she was headed for the door.

Buffy bit her lip. “Be careful, Faith. He sounds like he’s being really unpredictable right now. Like, you know… nothing we’ve seen before.”

Faith nodded, back to them. “Not soul-boy, not unsouled monster-boy. I get it. I’ll be careful. We’ll see how it goes down.” She waved the hand with the cigarette. “I’ll call when I know something.” And she was gone.

“Bloody hell,” Spike put in, breaking the silence that resounded after her departure. “Knew he was hurting, but I never thought I’d see the day when Moody the Great went and offed a load of humans just so he could have more to brood about.”

Buffy sighed and closed her eyes. “Is it just me, or is everything seriously going nuts? We’re fighting a god, Angel’s losing his mind…”

Spike grunted. “We’re not fighting much of anything right now. Since this Glory whore is sitting about doing nothing of late, I’m still not convinced we shouldn’t go with her to sit on Peaches and figure out what the bloody hell his problem is. Maybe I’ll go track down Dru and the old bent bitch and set ‘em on fire or somesuch…”

“Oh, please,” Buffy interrupted, and turned a little to lay her cheek on his shoulder. “As if you’d ever do anything to hurt Drusilla.”

“Well…maybe not,” he answered after a sec. “Love to have a go at Darla, though. She used to cheer Angelus on when he…” He halted then, gave a little shake of his head. 

Buffy stilled, held her breath. “What?” she prodded softly.

“Nothing. Never mind.” He came abruptly to his feet. “No love lost, is all. We lived together, we were a family. I loved them, we were mad, we trounced our way through Europe like a whirlwind of death and destruction, I thought nothing could be better… and the first few years were filled with an odd combination of love and hate, greed, manipulation, sex and pain… And that’s how it is sometimes. It’s over, love. Long since over.”

She wasn’t entirely sure about that, since couldn’t read him. His feels, his tone, none of it. And that, above and beyond anything else, made her realize that she really, really didn’t want to know. “Okay.” She waited a breath, then… “Are you worried about him? Or about Dru? Or…” She’d be dumb to think the whole ‘I hate Angel and Angel hates me and I wouldn’t care if he dusted tomorrow’ thing wasn’t just a little bit of a front. After all, like he said, they’d been family, however complicated the feelings were in that whole big ball of mess. He might  _ mostly _ hate his grandsire, but he still cared about the guy; in the same way that you couldn’t not love a parent who’d raised you, even when they’d done their share of abusing you, and your sibling-slash-mother.

God, families were weird, even before you got into the whole vamp-nest thing. 

Spike remained silent for a long moment, then cracked under the pressure of her understanding. “Dammit, Buffy…” He shot to his feet, began to pace. “I  _ hate _ him.” He whirled, glared at her as if she had backed him into a corner. “And I love him. And I’ll  _ always _ want him to accept me.” Throwing his hands away from himself, he spun again on his heel, faced away from her, in the direction of Will’s empty side of the room, just out of range of the stray glints of sunlight from the messed-up blinds. “And it makes me feel a right prat for wanting that, because why the bloody hell do I even care, when he…”

“Because he’s your father.” /Who slept with your… Well, crap. With both the women you’ve loved the most, and ew. And now we’ve crossed into ‘vampire families are nasty’, and how the hell did I even get involved in this mess, anyway?/ 

The realization hit. /Also, he messed with both our heads, so that one of us couldn’t ever love you the right way, and one of us almost missed her chance to love you at all, because I was so convinced that all the lies he told me about you were true; that you were nothing more than a monster. What I would’ve missed; this loving, beautiful poet of a demon, and man…/ The thought of it terrified, even in a supposal. /And yeah, we’ve gotten past most of that, thank God… but the Dru thing is still a thing, and it’s always  _ gonna _ be a thing, and…/ “And we always want what we know we’re never gonna get from parents. And they know it, so some of ‘em withhold it forever to keep us trying. It’s, like, a strategy to keep stringing kids along. I read about it in Psych…”

Spike made a frustrated noise at the far wall. “I’m not a bloody Pavlov dog, nor yet a rat in a maze, nor a soddin’ dolphin ringing a bell to get fish. I’m grown and on my own and…” 

“And he made you the vampire you became,” she reminded him patiently. “Him and Dru. And you’re just now, in the last year, deciding who you want to be on your own, outside of all of that… conditioning.” It really hit her now, out of nowhere, that in some ways, Spike was as new to building the kind of relationship they were fighting for as she was. “Not just theirs, but everything you’ve ever been told a vampire  _ should _ be, huh?” she went on slowly. /The same way I was told all about it. And about Slayers, and… We were  _ both _ lied to; made smaller, told we had fences around what we could be, what we could accomplish… and about how much we could love./ 

“You’re choosing your own destiny,” she informed his back softly. “And besides; I get the feeling, based off the stuff you’ve told me about your life before, that you never really got to live for you, then, either, right? To be your own man?” He tensed, half-turned his upper-torso to glance at her. “You were living for your mom, before. So you’ve never really had the chance to figure out who you were gonna be, did you?” It was a slow realization; that her Spike, her William, had been living in a sort of love-chrysalis till they had come together, and was only turning into everything he could be, now, with her. “You were whoever your mom needed you to be, and then you were whoever Angelus wanted you to be, and then you were whatever Dru needed you to be. And then you came here…” She felt her way through it, slow but with growing certainty. “And now you’re trying to figure out this balance between being who you need to be to be with me… and who you actually want to be, as your own man, your own vampire, for the first time in your entire existence.  _ Either _ existence. Which…” 

Reaching out, she made a fortunate grab, caught his hand. “I want you to. Because, seriously. Look at me. I got Called, and all the sudden I never thought I’d get to be anything but a Slayer since then, you know?” Predictably, he turned the rest of the way to regard her then, watching her with that awed fascination of his. And whatever he’d been feeling, carefully fenced off, rushed into her; curiosity foremost now amidst a whirling maelstrom of emotions. “The last time I got to have dreams about my life outside that screwed up destiny was when I was fourteen.” She gave his hand a squeeze. “But you’re trying to help me figure that out; you know, ‘Who will Buffy be?’ Not just in this relationship, not just ‘who does Buffy have to be to be with Spike’, but who am I as, like, this grown up woman, outside of being the Slayer.” And she finally got it. Why it mattered, even if she might die tomorrow. “You’re so  _ serious _ about that. And I think it’s because you know what it’s like to live for everyone else but yourself.” 

He moved to crouch then, before her, hand rising to brush her face. She caught him just shy of doing so, held his cupped palm to her cheek. “So, hey. We’ll figure it out together, huh?”

“Yeah,” he whispered. “Let’s us do that, love.”

“And don’t let him get under your skin,” she told him softly. “Whoever he wanted you to be… he didn’t know you. He never knew you. He only knew who  _ he _ wanted you to be. But that’s not you. And I happen to think you’re pretty neat just the way you are, okay? So it doesn’t matter that you couldn’t live up to what he wanted from you, right? Because why  _ should _ you? The world never needed two Angeluses, anyway, did it?”   
He blinked, then snorted in hard derision. “Hell no. One is bloody well enough!”

She leaned forward, till her lips were hovering just shy of his. “Good. Glad you realize that. Because I was never, not once, in danger of sleeping with Angelus. And I’m not even remotely interested in boinking Angel again, so when it comes to living up to his expectations… Did you ever really want to?” It was a trick question, she knew, since he’d had to in effect ‘be Daddy’ for his insane sire for over a hundred years, wearing the role like an ill-fitting costume to keep her love, and to keep her whole… and he must wonder sometimes why she, Buffy, preferred vampires as her lovers. How he then in turn fit in as her second in  _ that _ role. 

She let her eyes blaze into his, waiting; just daring him to answer with anything but the negative. 

He stared back for a moment, then a faint smile touched the corners of his lips, and he huffed out a breath and shook his head. “You’re a manipulative chit, you.”

“Did it work?”

The smile widened to the confident smirk she loved. “Kiss me, you madwoman.”

“Now, that’s an easy one.”

***

Faith called in every three or four days, mostly to inform them that Angel was being all impossible to pin down, that he was generally under the radar, though the double-D duo’s exploits were definitely easy to track. She had taken to following them around in hopes that she might run into Angel on their trail, since per Cordy-and-Co, he felt his former family were kind of his mess to clean up.

Knowing that all that was going down with his vamp-fam in LA made Spike jumpy as hell. And on top of that, Glory continued to be a no-show, which was making  _ all _ of them jump at shadows. 

The whole damn thing was anxious-making. In summary, Buffy’s sex life was kind of starting to suffer, and she was seriously upset about it, being as her birthday was rapidly on approach. /Isn’t it just, like, karma for everything to go to shit right around now so that my birthday can be…/

“C’mere, pet.”

“Buh?” Spike had a hold of her arm. “Where did you come from?”

“It’s eleven thirty-three,” he answered, as if that explained everything.

Buffy glanced up the walkway toward the house. “Uh, yeah?”

“So, you’re not going in there.”

She blinked at him. “I’m not?”

He stared at her like she’d lost her damn mind. “Not sure why the hell you came here. You knew what was happening last year. Come on, then.” And he started hustling her in the other direction; toward the car, which he had idling down by the curb. “Got less than a half-hour to spare to get you back to the crypt before midnight.”

Buffy planted her feet firmly in the grass and dug in. “Okay, Spike, can you clue me into your thought-processes? Because I’m kinda starting to think you’re doing some inherited-insanity thing from your crazy sire, which is so not a good look for you.” 

He rolled his eyes skyward, so they gleamed in the light of the streetlamps. “I’ve a deadline to keep, pet. Your birthday starts at midnight, yeah? So get in the bloody car, and let me get you back to the crypt where I can love you insensible, before you start in thinkin’ the day’s cursed again.”

She blinked some more, arrested by his determined expression. “Oh. Right. I… forgot that you… did that.” Or, rather, she hadn’t forgotten so much as… /I guess I just was already all wrapped up in the ‘everything sucks on my birthday’ train./ “Uh, should I bring anyth…”

“No. Just your delectable self. I’ve everything prepared.”

“Oh.” She felt a little out of step with reality as he hustled her to the passenger side of the DeSoto, and remained somewhat bemused all the way to Restfield. 

Reality came crashing in when she stepped down ahead of him, into the lower level of their little love-nest… and saw what he’d done with the place. 

The candles were all lit, transforming the cave-like room into a flamey den of flickering enticement. The bed had been newly made, and was all silky and begging to be debauched. 

And it was covered with red roses. There were long-stemmed ones all around the edges of the mattress, and the middle was totally scattered with petals, and… “Oh my God.”

“I’m gonna lay you down, there amidst the smell of the flower of love, and I’m going to worship you till you don’t know your name anymore. Till you can’t breathe. For hours upon hours. All presents can be delivered upstairs, or they can wait.” His hands trailed along, up under her hair, lifted it, and he dropped little shivery kisses, traced a delicate roadmap with his tongue along her nape, over the little bumps of her spine, making her tremble. “Your party is officially moved to the day after your birthday, from here till forever. From here on out, your birthday belongs to me, and my mouth, and your gorgeous body, and let none put us asunder.” His fingers trailed down then, brushing lightly over her nipples. Tweaked them, just enough to make her jerk, her breath catch. “Then, after I’ve thoroughly debauched you for twenty-four hours… you get prezzies.”

“Nnnnn…” Her arms had already risen of their own accord to snake around his neck, trapping him behind her. 

“What do you want, my love?” he asked her, fingers still trailing slowly south. He brushed, ever so slightly, over her mons, the thin material of her skirt hinting at easy access. “I’m your willing slave.”

God, he wanted her to talk? “I don’t want to think. I just want you to make my body talk to you. Turn off my brain, Spike. Forever.”

He made that one low, pleased rumble against her neck… and nipped her hard, sucking at the flesh of her neck. And pressed with his hips, so that his finger was suddenly right  _ there _ , brushing against her clit as she bucked, let out a little cry at the familiar surge of lust-excitement-need that always resulted from his love-bites. “Gonna make you come right now, while you’re standing here.”  _ Tap _ . “And then, when your thighs are wet with your juices,”  _ tap _ , “and your boots are damp with it,”  _ tap _ , “and you can barely stand…” He pushed her hard against his hand, and set to work in earnest. His voice receded a little, as if down a long tunnel. “…Then I’ll have you on the bed…”

/Oh God…/ Standing was already starting to be an issue.

“Make you come again. And again. And you’re not getting my cock till maybe one, two in the morning…”

/Oh  _ God _ …/ “Maybe I’ll… rethink…” 

He moved against her, his fingers keeping her  _ this _ close, and she short-circuited past the ability to form words. 

“I think,” he informed her ear, as he slowly—too slowly—bunched up her skirt in his hands, “I’ll keep you facedown for a while, as well. So you won’t know when I’ve decided to take you. I’ve never done that, yet, have I? Eaten that lovely quim while you buried your face in the pillows and screamed at me, begged for my cock, and wondered when… Oh, when… Fuck; when the hell are you gonna get it?”

Buffy shivered as he slipped his fingers back to trail over her very, very wet panties… and moved to walk her blindly toward the bed. 

She was in for a  _ very _ long night.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
I LOVE the Santa Anas. I miss them like woah. They are winds that blow from late fall/ish onward (and occasionally other times) in SoCal, and are these warm surges of wind blowing off the high deserts down toward the sea at 40mph (60kph) EASY, but feel like this strong, warm hand just scooping you up to carry you off to another dimension or something (and you can quote me on that and use it in your own fics), they are strong and dry and so comforting when the seasons are turning... and they're sometimes called the Devil's Winds because they fan a lot of the wildfires. I have recently found out that technically according to the way the coast bows out in the area, they don't blow in Santa Barbara, but I'm ignoring that fact strenuously, because the Santa Anas are such a part of my California experience that I've decided there's a small devil's vortex near Sd that causes them to come in there as well. Because I said so. And no one can stop me.  
  
As to where I got my weird ideas about Clem... I'm determined to have some (well, not asexual reproduction, per se, but less sex-requiring, if you get me) in this thing (aside from vamps and werewolves, which, when you get down to it, really are, but the former mix so much sex into it that it gets confusing), because the demon world is vast and fascinating, and if they didn't have more of that (without sticking eyeballs on the back of people's heads) I'd get bored. Binaries and sexual reproduction is just so... human. Heh.  



	32. Chapter 32

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Getting back to some plotty Glorificus goodness.  
> Some dialogue from "Checkpoint" in this one, since I be playin' around with the timeline. And also "Listening To Fear" (I think).
> 
> Y'all rock.   
> Also, love to wolf_shadoe, as always, for finding time to be everywhere at once with my jillion fics at a time.

“So, um… when are we gonna do that thing for you?” She trailed a finger down along Spike’s chest, not quite meeting his eyes partially because she was exhausted, and partially because she didn’t want him to think she was pushing. Not even a little. But… he had just spent all night doing all  _ sorts _ of things for her, and she kinda  _ did _ want to go on that one shopping trip, and… stuff. “I thought when you said shopping, that maybe…” To her horror, she realized she was blushing a little.

Spike propped himself up on one elbow, and by the feel of him she knew he had one eyebrow up as he regarded her with interest, maybe some amusement… but, thank goodness, no sense of being backed into a corner or anything. “You wanna go shopping, pet?”

“Well,” she hesitated, “yeah. I mean, if you want to. Not necessarily to use anything… right away.” Lifting her head, she caught his eye. “I was thinking that… I mean, we can get other stuff too, right? Like, for other…”

The upstairs echoed like a gong, and they both jumped. Someone was banging on the metal door of the crypt. 

“Bloody fuck, love; hold that thought.” Spike leapt from the bed, sporting quite the erection, which told her that he had been thoroughly interested in the direction the conversation had taken, and grabbed up his jeans. “Won’t take me a moment to kill whoever that is, and then we can get back to the topic at hand…”

The door creaked open above. Spike yanked his jeans up hard over his damp bits, cursing as the zipper chafed stuff, and headed for the ladder. 

Buffy grinned at his gyrations. The jeans were mostly covering the pertinents, but his excellent butt was still largely exposed. Which was nice. “You need any help, there?” He could interpret the offer any which way he wanted.

“I’ll let you know,” he informed her as he swarmed awkwardly up the ladder. “No sense in you getting your gorgeous self into anything like clothes unless it proves needful…” He pushed aside the slab covering their hidey-hole, and froze. “What the bloody hell happened?” he demanded. 

Faith’s voice drifted down through the hole. “Sorry to interrupt the birthday sex, Blondie. Tell B no need to get her clothes on…” 

Buffy felt herself blushing unaccountably, and fought the urge to tug the bedclothes up to her chin, despite the fact that Spike blocked most of the entry hole and that you couldn’t really see the bed from where Faith no doubt stood.

“I just got back into town and thought I’d let y’all know I was back.”

Spike took the other Slayer’s report in stride. “Caught Peaches and tied him up somewhere, is it? Battered the git back to his senses?” 

Faith’s response was crisp… and filled with carefully-disguised regret. “Nope. Hell, I might need her help to corner the prick, if we decide I need to go back in. We might not, though. That’s the reason I came over. Just to drop the FYI. ‘Cause I did eventually run into him, and let me tell you; he’s definitely still soul-boy. He’s just being a fucking bastard. Which… not sure what to do about that, you know?” 

Buffy had long since given up hiding in the blankets in favor of throwing on underwear and a camisole. By the end of this incredible little speech she was hustling over to practically climb up Spike’s butt. She hung off the ladder behind him to crane her neck and peer out past him, fighting to catch even a glimpse of Faith’s face. “Did he fight you, or just…”

“Nice panties, B.”

Buffy didn’t even have time right now to worry about her state of undress.  _ “Faith…” _

“Chill, girl. No, he didn’t throw down. It was like he didn’t give a damn; about anything. He just told me to fuck off and walked away. He doesn’t believe in anything anymore; which, hell.” Faith’s expression went tight. “It’s not like we can make him, you know? There’s no cure for someone who’s given up. You can’t refill the give-no-fucks meter by wishing someone a bunch of warm-fuzzies. So I’m really not sure what the fuck to do about the guy.”

“Oh.” /Shit./ 

“Yeah. I mean, he cares about his personal vendetta against those lawyers. He’s kinda being vigilante boy—like Batman or some shit—but that’s about it.”

Spike snorted so hard it vibrated through his back and into Buffy’s body. “Oh, bollocks. I’ll make him care.” He swiveled, catching Buffy’s eye over his shoulder. “We should head there, pet. Quick day away. Faith and I’ll hold him down, you kick him a few times, then I can say a few choice things to him that’ll put the fire back in his arse; things you don’t even know about…”

Buffy frowned. She knew they had history… but the family connection had been severed. She wasn’t sure how much Spike could do when it came to… “He staked his sire,” she reminded him quietly. “They brought her back, human. She remembered everything they’d shared, somehow. The whole century-plus. Then they called Dru to kill her again in front of his eyes, but in a way so she’s not his sire anymore. Now she’s his grandchilde. Their relationship’s all wrong. How would that even  _ feel?” _

Spike stilled to utter silence. 

“Yeah, well,” Faith put in, “whatever it did to him, he’s off the hinges, B. I’ve never seen him like this.” She twirled a stake absently between her fingers; a move Buffy could see only through a sliver of opening past Spike’s head and shoulder. All she could really see of Faith was her ear, her stake-hand, and her elbow. “Honestly, it’s like he’s empty, you know? Like, all, ‘Angel has left the building’. Like I’d be doing him a favor if I dusted him. And I really don’t wanna do that if I don’t have to. Unless I think he’s really not gonna come back from this, and there’s no other choice, because let’s be real. I owe that guy a lot.”

Buffy nodded, looked away, technically focusing on Spike’s back, though in the moment what she was seeing was Angel’s face on one of the myriad times he had come to warn her in some cryptic fashion or another that she was in danger, or appearing from the shadows to walk beside her in the dark when she had been new at the whole ‘protect the hellmouth’ gig. “In a way, we all do,” she opined, “for better or worse.”

Spike made a faint scoffing noise, but his shoulders settled slightly. “S’pose if he hadn’t sired Dru and made her what she was, poor bird would never have sought out yours truly, and I’d be lyin’ peaceful in my grave, dead of tuberculosis at the ripe old age of thirty. I’ll give the git that much at least.”

Above them, Faith made a harsh sound that might’ve been a chuckle. “That’s the spirit, Blondie.” The stake in her hand spun again, then disappeared as she shoved it back into her waistband. “I think I’ll hang around here for a few days; chill and see how things go before I head back. I need a mental health break from LA. Hell; maybe our girl Glory’ll come out of the woodwork and give me something to pound on, huh?” She vanished from Buffy’s view, her voice trailing back from the direction of the exit. “Have a good birthday, B. See you tomorrow.” A faintly amused note touched her voice. “Maybe I’ll buy you some new undies. Those ones look like they’ve been through the wringer.” And the door creaked to indicate her departure.

“Oh, jeez,” Buffy put in, and dropped her forehead to Spike’s spine.

“She’s just trying to lighten the mood, luv,” Spike answered her exclamation, and nudged her with his butt to urge her back down. “C’mon. We’ve still a few hours to kill.”

Buffy groaned. “Did you even hear all that? My birthday curse strikes again…”

“Bollocks,” he answered, and started down slowly, so that she was forced to descend to make space or be knocked off the ladder. “Faith’s back in town, my idiot grandsire’s still being an idiot, and none of it has anything at all to do with your birthday, or the excellent shagging we will be resuming within the next thirty seconds…” He turned to face her as he dropped off the bottom rung. “At least, unless you let it.”

Well, she supposed he had a point. Worrying about the mess in LA wouldn’t change it, she and Angel had long since agreed to leave each other’s cities alone, right now things were pretty great in hers, and… “Okay,” she whispered, and lifted her arms to invite Spike back into them. “You’re right. Sorry. I won’t let it get into my head.”

“Good,” he answered certainly, and stepped closer. Set his palms to her waist, drew her in, dropped his forehead to hers… and to her surprise, guided her into a slow dance, stepping along to some music only he heard. “Love you, Buffy. Happy birthday.”

Buffy felt emotion rise to choke her, catching her tight in her throat, and had to blink away tears. God, what had she done in her life before she had this guy to love her? “I really, really love you, Spike.”

***

It was tough not to wonder and worry about what Glory was or wasn’t up to. They of course tried—and failed—to figure it out with spells and casing the town from top to bottom. The new kid, Andrew, even conjured some kind of weird demon from a dimension of demons that worked like bloodhounds, attracted to power, but for some reason it kept losing the scent the same way Spike had (Having attempted to follow her scent from the zoo, before, Spike had informed them that it cut out abruptly, like Glory just ceased to exist mid-march or something, which was weird). 

Bloodhound-y demon did manage to narrow things down to the same general region as where they’d taken down the giant cobra thing. Unfortunately that’s when it went nuts, maddened by the on-again, off-again nature of its quarry, and had to be destroyed. Andrew was really good at summoning stuff, but sadly not so great at sending things back to where they came from. They didn’t ask him to try again. Buffy really didn’t like having to kill something they had unceremoniously kidnapped to their dimension without its consent to do a job for them. It didn’t feel very ethical. 

Unfortunately by then they had had no other choice but to put the creature down… so that had sucked. But the thing could no longer be controlled, was starting to rampage around chasing down anybody with any kind of power at all; Willow, Anya, Tara, Jonathan, Andrew, Giles, that one kid in the playground who had some kind of childish version of future strength… And, weirdly, Xander. So they did what they had to do.

Back at square one, they debated the situation. Glory was stationed somewhere in the vicinity of Rugg’s Field—a reality which kind of made Buffy wonder at the coincidence, since that was where they had put down the Hellions—but the park was huge, and surrounded by housing developments (mostly apartments, a few condos), so that didn’t really help them. It wasn’t like they could storm her castle to figure out her plan, since they had no clue where their visiting deity was holed up. And, knocking on every door around the park asking people if they were a god was probably out. 

It seemed they had to wait for god-chick to make a move; and currently there was no sign of the bitch. 

In the interim, and at a loss for anything else to do to track her movements, Faith had actually come up with a kind of brilliant way to keep tabs on at least whether their current nemesis was still in town, and how active she was. “We should drop in on the mental ward in the hospital once a week or whatever, huh? Check in on the crazies? If there’re more, it probably means the bitch’s doing whatever she’s doing to ‘em again.”

She had a point. There had to be some connection, right? 

Faith suited action to words while she was in town; took that one on as a way to test her theory, with Graham as her backup, since she was still keeping the soldier in her back pocket as sex-toy-slash-assistant. They hit up the psych ward that Saturday, and again on the next one; ostensibly to help him ‘look for his missing soldier’. And wouldn’t you know it, her suspicions turned out to be correct. On both of their inspections, the ward seemed to be steadily refilling with crazies.

Glory was definitely still around. “Which is good, because I want my shot at the bitch. The way you two have talked her up, I’m starting to really wonder if I can take her. Don’t want her to leave town before I get my chance.” Faith was really starting to take it personally that she hadn’t yet had an opportunity to fight their resident god. “Man, Angel really picked a shitty time to develop a personality crisis. I hope he gets his shit together so I don’t have to take off again. I wanna try her so bad…”

“Okay, but just what the hell is she doing to these people?” Buffy demanded. She had no patience right now for Faith’s impulsive urge to throw down  _ mano a mano _ with their big bad, when at this particular moment they seemed to be developing a plague of crazy on the hellmouth. 

“Oh, hell; I dunno, B, but we’ll stop her.” Faith seemed absolutely unmoved by this concern, which, really?

Buffy was putting the finishing touches on an essay down at the computer lab one evening near the end of the month when, of all people, Graham showed up at her elbow. “Hey.”

She looked up… and lifted her brows. “Uh…” He was wearing some really nice clothes. “You going somewhere fancy?”

“I hope so. I wanted to take Faith out. But, you know, not somewhere too nice, or she’ll tell me to go to hell. Somewhere nice enough to impress her without scaring her off. I thought maybe you could give me some pointers, since you two have known each other since…” He made a faint, confused face. “Whenever.”

/Oh, wow. Check this guy. Dude, you’re so gonna get your heart broken./ Faith was incredibly insistent on keeping things casual with this guy, whether she really liked him deep inside or no. The idea of sharing mutual affection with anyone truly terrified her sister-Slayer;  _ especially _ with someone male. Buffy even got why—really got it, based on what little Faith had spilled about her family life during their short stint as bad girls together—and look at this dude here. He was trying  _ so _ hard.

He really, really liked her. Maybe worse. /Eee, are you falling for her?/

Oh, man. “Uh, there’s a demon-run restaurant, in the alley behind the Boot Barn. It’s French. It might impress her because they do the whole tablecloths thing and all that. Shiny silverware… but since it’s a demon place and it’s in an alley, she might not run…”

Graham straightened. “Right. Thanks.” He started to turn.

Buffy caught his sleeve. “You’re gonna have to be careful.”

He stilled. Nodded. “I already picked up on that.”

Buffy shook her head, locked her gaze on his. “No, I mean it. Your odds are  _ so _ bad. She trusts chicks a lot more—still not a ton, but a little more—but with guys…” She shook her head slowly. “Her father left when she was pretty young. He came back here and there; just enough to give her hope, take her to football games, stuff like that, but he always took off again. I think it became this game to her; playing around, trying to keep his affection, but knowing he was always gonna bail. So dating is...”

Graham was nodding. “I figured it was… something like that. All I can do is show her… I don’t play games. That I’m here.”

Buffy nodded, looked down, bit her lip. She wasn’t sure if it was fair of her to talk too much behind Faith’s back, but hints… It wasn’t like Faith had actually told her any of this. She’d guessed. And she knew Faith really did like this guy; that it would hurt her sister even more if the thing with Graham fell to expectations.

Turning, she caught up the little triangular piece of plastic that claimed a computer as ‘in use’, set it over the keyboard, and stood to catch Graham’s arm. “C’mere. Outside.” It was no one else’s business, after all.

He followed her out into the corridor without complaint, stood beside her, leaning against the wall with his jaw tight, and waited. “I think they were both alcoholics; her parents,” Buffy finished, quietly. /There’s a reason she got Xander, and he got her./ She hesitated, a nagging feeling of uncertainty touching her. This was a little bit of walking on sacred ground, here; that feeling of ‘not my story to tell’. And yet… she wasn’t telling anything she had been told. She had no details to share. She was warning him off, more than anything. “And… there was other stuff; or at least, I’m pretty sure. Stuff she didn’t tell me, but... you can tell, you know? Stuff that happens when your mother has boyfriends and doesn’t pay attention to what they’re doing in the house.” 

Graham froze… then nodded slowly, in the way of someone who was getting the answer to a long-niggling question. Buffy held her breath for a moment, exhaled hard. “So… She doesn’t believe in healthy. Or safe. Or trust. She thinks the only way to stay safe is to stay at arms’ length.” She shot him a brief look. “I have no idea how this is gonna work for you.”

He nodded again, eyes riveted on the far wall. His jaw worked for a second, a muscle rippling in it, and then he turned and drove his fist, hard, into the cork of the bulletin board next to his head, and exhaled sharply. Stilled, legs akimbo, then, “I’m gonna go strip down and work out over at the phys ed center before I meet up with her.” Bright, crystal eyes caught hers, clouded with pain and frustration, as he absently ran a palm over his injured fist. “Thanks for the advice.”

“Sure.”

As he was heading for the doors, the niggling feeling inside Buffy worsened. She and Faith were just starting to get on even ground again. If Faith ever found out she’d interfered, talked out of turn, even trying to be helpful… 

The words burst out. “Hey, Graham?”

He turned and waited, tense and clearly dying to go smack his emotions out on a speedbag or something, but polite enough to pause and hear her out. 

“Faith and I are… delicate. Can you keep it between us, that you came to me?”

A little smile quirked just the corner of his lips, and all the sudden Buffy saw what Faith saw in the guy. He really was cute, in a wholesome kind of way. “I already knew that was the deal before I even came to you. Besides. She knows I’m a pretty smart guy. I already kinda figured some of that stuff out before you confirmed it.” The smile faded, and his eyes went steely, harsh. “It’s just, hearing it flat out makes a guy kinda wanna hunt some people down and put the hurt on ‘em, you know?”

Buffy knew. She wouldn’t mind doing some damage to a few people who’d hurt Spike in the past. “Yeah, I get that.”

“Thanks, Buffy.” And he was gone.

Later that evening, as she and Spike left an interminable meeting in that abandoned store where Ethan Rayne had had his costume shop—the place never kept a tenant for long and had enjoyed a revolving cast of characters over the last couple of years since. Maybe it was cursed?—she drew in a few deep breaths of the relatively cool outside air and glanced around her. They were only a few minutes away from the Boot Barn. Maybe they should check in?

Maybe she was being overly solicitous?

“What’s goin’ on in that gorgeous head of yours, pet? You were barely payin’ attention during negotiations. Blatark almost got away with murder in there. I had to do most of the mediating…”

Buffy closed her eyes, rotated her shoulders to loosen them up… and sighed a little as his hands fell promptly to the task of massaging away the tension there. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m just… a little worried about Faith. She’s on a date with Graham, and…”

He stilled, scoffed. “You’re worried because the chit’s on a date?”

Buffy shook her head slightly. “He’s trying too hard. She’s gonna push him away, and it’ll just confirm everything for her. What’s that phrase?”

“Self-fulfilling prophesy,” Spike answered, voice a little flat.

“Yeah, that.” She let the regret she was feeling color her tones.

His magic fingers resumed their work. “Well, if she does, it’s hardly your lookout, pet. C’mon. Let’s go home. I’ll put some ice on your neck, set you up in front of the telly…”

“It is.” Buffy bit her lip. “I sorta-kinda interfered.”

Silence for a sec, then, “Oh, bloody hell, love. Why’d you go and do that?”

She knew he’d think she was crazy for doing it. “I dunno. He came to me at school and asked for advice, and I opened my big mouth, and…” She exhaled, hard and anxious. “I need to check on her.”

He puffed out a bunch of exasperated air, then growled and struck out, up the street. “Where?”

“Just up the road. At the little French place we were supposed to…”

He halted, swung on her. “You gave away our date?” he demanded, clearly horrified. 

“He was desperate.”

Spike was glaring now as he hove nearer, stared into her eyes. “I’m still takin’ you there. Soon as we can manage it, so don’t let whatever happens for her tonight spoil it for you, yeah?”

“Okay,” Buffy agreed softly, and let him see it in her eyes; her promise that she wouldn’t.

“Alright then,” he answered, and swung around once more to lead the way, strides long and jarring. 

They were in the mouth of the alley when it happened. They hadn’t even made it far enough to turn the corner and get the well-disguised door in view when they were rushed by… someone. 

Whoever he was, he was wearing armor. Like, a lot of it. Buffy’s automatic pulling of a stake did her no good against the heavy, jangling coat of chain-mail underneath his—no shit—white surcoat as he grabbed her around the waist and used the not-insignificant gravity of his armor, along with his momentum, to attempt to drag her off her feet and to the ground. 

She was back on the balls of her feet in an instant and backing away, dull, splintered stake in her hand. Spike was growling at her side, fanged out… and then he stilled. “Blighter’s human, Buffy,” he informed her, sounding confused. 

“Huh. Color me lost.”

The armored human dodged in, gauntleted hand up, and swung in an attempt to backhand Buffy across the face, like she was some sort of disappointing, ill-behaved brat. Before the hand could land, Spike had his arm and was twisting it hard and outward. “No offense, mate, but no one slaps the Slayer like that. For one, it’s soddin’ rude. For another, it’s just all-round bad form, yeah?” And he threw the guy away from him, so hard he stumbled. 

“Foul monster!” Armor-Guy answered, and caught his balance to circle around, away from Spike and back toward Buffy on amazingly light feet, considering his probably hundred pounds of jangly metal. He had drawn his sword now; a gleaming thing in the low light. “It is a sure indication of your perfidy, woman, that you ally yourself with such evil.”

“Uhuh, sure. You wanna tell me what you guys are up to, here in my town reenacting a weird Ren-Faire skit on the backstreets of Sunnydale after dark when you should be tucked in safe and sleeping? I mean, being human and all, this isn’t exactly the best time to run around playing swords and dragons. It’s not safe.”

Two more armored dudes with the same white garb and bearing the same sigil-thing on it appeared, coalescing out of the darkness from the bend in the alley. One of them bore some sort of metal truncheon; the other also had a drawn sword. And, okay, so those weren’t toys.

Real swords—the ones made for actual use, rather than for show—shone in a different way than the carbon steel stuff people bought from mail-order sales in magazines to play with and hang on the wall. Spring-steel was a little less bright-and-shiny, visibly sharper, held an edge… and these had seen use. They were nicked here and there, in that way that said they’d been re-sharpened after being used in combat. 

Spike snarled as the odds abruptly reset themselves. 

“I agree,” Buffy answered his unspoken opinion. “Guys, is there any way we can… you know, not do this? I have other stuff to deal with right now.”

They ignored her attempts at calling a cease-fire. Truncheon-dude was twirling his weapon, looking hungry to use it on her. Sword guy One was still hanging around at her right, dancing on the balls of his feet and looking, actually, pretty deadly and capable as he held his sword unwaveringly, all zeroed in in the direction of her throat. Nice. 

Sword-guy Two had his teeth bared, his sword pointed at Spike. “Buffy…” Spike ground out, through clenched teeth.

Dammit. “I know,” she answered, because it was a question of priorities. 

That impossible scenario she had been asked to face with him? It had just come to smack them right in the jaw. Not that she hadn’t had to face it already, with the Initiative, and she knew for sure what she would have done then. She didn’t know these guys from Adam, had no idea what their game was or why they were attacking, whether they deserved death… but right now, in this instant, they were threatening her life and her mate’s life. They could lop off his head, render him dust. 

He had to be able to defend himself. “Just… do your best not to kill ‘em. But… do what you have to.”

He relaxed infinitesimally… and drew his own sword from the spelled sheath at his side. “Right.” And he crouched, holding it out before himself, to face down the man approaching him. 

He looked a hell of a lot less helpless now he wasn’t empty-handed.

Buffy saw, out of the corner of her eye, the way the approaching combatant jerked, taken aback by the sudden appearance of a previously-invisible weapon. /See? We’re not as toothless as you thought, huh?/ Turning her full attention back on her own combatant, she dragged a similarly disguised weapon from its bespelled sheath at her hip and nodded at sword-boy one and truncheon-guy. “So, we gonna do this, or what?”

They were just really getting into the fight—a nice spinny-kicky-swordy thing—when a couple of familiar voices broke in. Which was… kind of a good thing, since it was a lot tougher to fight someone and get anywhere when they were flat-out trying to kill you, and you were only trying to knock ‘em out, but fighting really hard to turn your blows at the last second so you  _ didn’t _ kill them if you could possibly manage it.

Buffy was just picking herself up from a little flight into a pile of garbage when she heard Faith call, “Hey guys. Who are the movie extras, and why are they picking a fight?”

“Look more like SCA rejects. Though, why they’re pulling swords on your girl and her guy in the middle of the night in an alley is anyone’s guess.” Graham.

“Listen,” Spike broke in, grunting with effort, “you gonna just stand there and spectate, or join in? Ain’t as easy as it looks… Sod off, you nit! You almost took off my ear! …To fight the tossers and not kill ‘em…”

“Huh,” Faith answered, sounding intrigued. “So, we’re not talking some kinda demon-cult, like the Eliminati? These guys are human?”

Buffy rolled to her feet and swiped with her sword to knock truncheon-guy off of his. He fell with a clatter, rose again almost immediately. Damn, if she’d been fighting for ten minutes straight wearing all that metal, she’d be flat on her back. These dudes were tough. “Picked that up fast, Faith. Jeez, get in this!”

Faith heaved a put-upon sigh. “I hate this. Humans are so damn delicate. Here, cutie. Hold my leftovers.” And there came the sound of a solid punch. Another.

“Ta, pet.”

“No charge. 

All the sudden she hove into view behind truncheon guy, who swerved away from Buffy to swing on the new threat. “Oh, chill, Inigo Montoya,” Faith told him as she ducked a swing and kicked him hard in the knee. While he was hopping and cursing, she knocked aside his heavy steel weapon, sucker-punched him in the gut hard enough to probably cause internal damage, then swept his one leg. 

While he was down for the count, Buffy was able to concentrate on her single opponent for a change. Glaring, his eyes blazing with some kind of fervent zealotry, said opponent swung for her face.

It was a solid punch. Buffy blocked it anyway, landed her own right between his eyes while holding his sword-arm out of the way. 

He staggered back… sans sword, since she had kept ahold of it. Disarmed, he roared and came back in, shaking his head to resettle himself. 

“Man, you take a lickin’ and keep on ticking, don’t you. You should quit while you’re ahead. I mean, I pulled that punch because I don’t wanna murder you flat out, but you’re seriously out of your league, here, so if I were y…”

He had a dagger out of his belt and was lunging overhand, teeth-bared and feral. She blocked the thrust automatically with her forearm, punched him in the gut. And then Spike was there to hold him in a half-nelson as he went down, Buffy right there to bring his own sword to bear, hold it at his throat. “Where’s the other guy?” she demanded, shooting a glance around the makeshift arena. 

“Army lad has him in hand. Helpin’ Faith to secure ‘em with a bit of twine they’ve found in the dumpster.”

“Oh. Well, good.” Turning her attention back to their newest prisoner, Buffy unceremoniously sat on his chest and pinned his arms with her knees, sword held across his throat. Spike squatted above his head, waiting and prepared to jump in if the idiot did anything stupid, while she commenced the interrogation. “Okay; let’s see what’s behind the mask, here...” 

With a modicum of struggle, Buffy dragged off the chain-mail and hood and stuff that obscured most of the guy’s face. “I feel like I’m in an episode of Scooby-Doo,” she began dryly to Spike… and halted, stunned, when she saw the features beneath the accouterments. 

It was a normal human face. Sweaty, dark hair, relatively handsome features… Those burning, zealot’s eyes. The only weird thing was, he had a symbol tattooed into his forehead, which was kind of extra. “Okay, what are you, guy?”

Their captive hissed. “One soldier in a vast army.”

Buffy lifted a brow, thrown. “What army?”

“We are the Knights of Byzantium,” he spat. “An ancient order. And now, your enemy.”

/Alrighty-o./ She gave the sword a little shove, till the edge was pressed hard against the tender flesh under his jaw. Fuckers. “You work for Glory?”

The dark eyes shifted from blazing certitude to sheer disgust. “You think we align ourselves with the Beast? You must be mad!”

/Uh, okay./ “You're the ones who tried to kill us. That kinda puts you on her side. Duh.”

The knight glared, his expression calling her an idiot. “No. We were fools, three alone.” He stilled then, his expression going calm with a strange sort of conviction. “But if it takes a hundred men, we send a hundred men, and if it takes a thousand, we send a thousand…”

/Um, okay, A, you’re a nutbar. B…/ Her eyes drifted up to meet Spike’s, a little worried now. “A thousand?” /There are a  _ thousand _ of you freaks?/

“So long as you protect the Key, the Brotherhood will never stop until we destroy it, and you…”

/Woah, hold up…/

“You are the Slayer, and we know what we must do. Now, be done with it. Kill us, and let legions follow.”

“Oh, bloody hell,” Spike whispered into the night.

Buffy scrambled off the guy’s chest. Backed off, sword held point out, aimed at his throat. 

The knight pushed slowly up off the filthy asphalt, onto his feet. Darted his eyes around him, to his fallen compatriots. To Faith and Graham, staring up at him where they crouched over the unconscious warriors. Back to Buffy. 

She kept the sword pointed unwavering at his neck. 

He seemed to be waiting for a kill-stroke. Dumbass. Did he think she just went around indiscriminately murdering people? “Go. Get out of here.”

His eyes widened. Realization slowly percolated into his eyes. They flickered again to his captive buddies… and then he was edging around her to depart out the mouth of the alley, into the night.

As he vanished, Buffy lowered her gaze to the sword in her hand. It was utilitarian, only ornate in the sense that it had that same sigil worked into the hilts and pommel as the one the dude had branded between his eyeballs. The freak. “You guys… I think we’re in a little more trouble than we thought with this whole Key thing.”

“Ya think, B?” Faith put in. She sounded amused.

“Hell,” Graham answered her, and squatted back on his heels, “this is awesome. I used to play knights and castles and stuff as a kid. I never thought I’d see a real one. How dope is that?”

Spike chuckled. Buffy swung on him, glaring. “Oh, so this is funny?”

He flashed back to a straight face, though his eyes were still dancing. “Only a bit, love.”

She shook her head at him. “Let me guess. You used to daydream about knights and dragons and maidens, too.”

“Well, of bloody  _ course _ I did! What the hell do you take me for?”

“Oh, jeez.”

“Tell you what, pet. I’ll be the damsel sometimes, yeah? You can rescue me. We’ll take it in turns.”

“Oh, shut up.” Grabbing his arm, Buffy nodded at her sister-Slayer. “Sorry to mess up your date.”

“Mess up, hell. I call that a great way to round out the night, huh?” She nudged Graham’s shoulder. “Fancy dinner, nice little fight, head back to his place for a roll in the hay…” She left the last part hanging suggestively.

Graham exhaled long and slow. “Guess I got my marching orders.” He shot Buffy a look. “What should we do with the, ah, POWs?”

Buffy frowned down at the unconscious dudes laid out on the alley floor. “We really need to figure out something for when we have captives.”

“Yeah.” Spike kicked lightly at one booted ankle. It lolled loosely, bespeaking unconsciousness. “Sure Rupert would love to interrogate this lot, but to do it we’d have to chain ‘em to a chair an’ the rest… and it sounds like they’re not exactly friendly to certain…” He cut off.

He didn’t need to say more. They couldn’t risk any member of this Byzantine Order or whatever they were getting anywhere near, or even catching sight of, Dawn. Which meant keeping one of them captive for information was out. “I guess we leave ‘em here to wander back to their buddies, then, and just tell Giles what we know.”

“More’s the pity.”

“No big,” Faith said as she rose. “Probably they’re in some book or other anyway. And if G-man doesn’t know, I can always call Wes and ask him. He’ll know if Giles doesn’t.” 

“Good point. Thanks, Faith.”

_“De nada."*_ Reaching out, she grabbed hold of Graham’s arm. “Give a girl a ride, cowboy?”

Graham blushed, shot them both an embarrassed glance. “She means on the Ducati. I brought her here on the bike. It’s parked around the corner…”

Spike barked a tight laugh and waved a dismissive hand. “At ease, soldier.” He turned to Buffy, jerked his head. “C’mon, Slayer. I wanna go check on Mum and the Niblet.” Buffy could feel the tension in him, humming like a live-wire.

Really, she couldn’t blame him for that. 

Why was there always some new threat in town? And why were they always somehow pointed at their family?

***

Giles had never heard of the Knights of Byzantium. Apparently neither had Wesley. Which… how had a bunch of hard-bitten guys, a militant order like that, around since, apparently, the era in which swords and chain-mail were the most popular kind of weaponry, escaped the notice of a group as thorough and widespread as the Watchers Council? (Also, why would you stick with the medieval thing for this long? Seriously. Like, Buffy had a good reason to stick with swords and stakes, but if you were going after a cosmic Key, wouldn’t you shoot for some kind of energy-weapon, or… Were they witches too, at least? Not that she wanted them to be, but… It was just weird.)

“I suppose it makes sense that I’d not have heard of this order, being as I haven’t heard of the monks who sent… Ah...” Giles faltered, picked up again, “…the Dagon sphere to you. And, of course, we’d found no mention of Glory herself before the Council brought us their intelligence on the matter…”

“Well, maybe  _ they _ know about these guys.”

“Ah, yes. Well, no doubt they can offer us some sort of assistance in the matter…”

While Giles was busy kibitzing with his UK buddies about the fanatics in armor, Buffy and Spike kept an eye on Dawn and tried to keep up the appearance of business as usual. One or another of them was always there to escort her home from school and to bring her there in the morning. Mom found the whole thing more than a little worrying, probably uber-suspicious, but she didn’t say anything. Glory didn’t rear up her head at all. Faith continued to pop her head into the hospital to check out the population of crazies, Graham at her side. Neither of them appeared to be in any way upset at Buffy for sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong when it came to their not-a-relationship, so clearly Graham was good at keeping state secrets. Which made sense, since he was formerly a part of a clandestine government group that had done experiments on fantasy creatures that by all rights shouldn’t exist in most people’s eyes. 

He seemed to be parlaying his new understanding of the other Slayer into a dogged, serious attempt at keeping himself in her good graces, though, because she hadn’t kicked him to the curb yet. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it just right.

Faith still stayed in her little makeshift apartment in the basement of Revello about four nights a week, though… which turned out to be a damn good thing, considering the way things went down when Glory finally did show back up in their lives. 

Buffy was kicking back with Spike, reading her Lit text—or, at least, trying to figure out what the hell it was telling her; the thing was super dense—while Spike occasionally murmured something about a sentence or another in that way that helped her to parse exactly what the hell the dopes were getting at. Dawn was across from them, sprawled sideways on the floor with her own homework spread out on the coffee table, slogging through Algebra I. Mom had just gotten home from the gallery and was intermittently regaling them with a truly hilarious anecdote about Anya and a customer who had been hitting on them both equally instead of buying anything. “…Which, while I don’t blame her… I’m actually kind of annoyed. Brian seems really attractive, and it’s not like I get a lot of gentlemen callers…”

“Gits, if they don’t see how gorgeous you are,” Spike supplied blandly. “Course, no man’s good enough for you. You sure you wanna let some tosser land one, Joyce, as was flirting with both you and Vengeance?”

Mom smiled slightly, secretively, and floated toward the dining room. “He was mostly flirting with me. I got the feeling he only flirted a little with Anya just to keep her from feeling left out. I think he thought she was too young for him, though. Which, of course, totally put her back up. Which is why she started in on him about how the gallery was a place of business, not a dating society…” She pursed her lips. “I love how blunt that girl is, but she can be terribly embarrassing.”

Buffy looked up from her textbook.  _ “Please _ tell me you got his number, Mom. I so want you to go on a date. You deserve it. I mean, one  _ not _ with my Watcher.” She frowned then. “Though, please, no details, I’m begging. But still. Date for Mom. A-plus idea…”

“Hear, hear. Though, if the bloke doesn’t show you a damn good time, I’ll rip out his spleen…”

“Okay, ew, Spike.”

“Hush, Niblet. What the bloody hell sort of name is Brian, anyway? Sounds a bit nancyish…”

A brisk knock sounded at the door, making them all jump.

Mom, whose mouth had opened, probably in preparation to defend ‘Brian’, paused and turned to face the door with a surprised expression. “Now, who do you suppose…” Approaching the door, she stretched up to glance through one of the three decorative, beveled panes that allowed one to see who had come calling… and froze. When her hand dropped to the knob, her body language was way wary. “Hello, Hank. To what do we owe the honor of a surprise visit?”

Buffy froze in her turn. /Oh. God./

Dawn dropped her pencil to the table and stared at the door as their father entered… and squealed as she shot to her feet to fling herself at him. 

He caught her, held her, patted her back absently, though his eyes remained fixed over the shining young head, on Buffy, there on the couch, half on Spike’s lap. “Well, you know… It’s Buffy’s birthday. Or, I know I’m a few days late, but it’s the weekend after, and it was the first day I could come out…”

Now, that was bullshit. Dad hadn’t bothered to come out for her birthday since before she’d finished high school; not for either child's. And, birthdays had been his only lame-ass attempt at keeping contact. That, and Christmas cards. He for damn sure hadn’t bothered to come out for any holidays in the name of ‘family togetherness’ or any crap like that. Once he’d given up the pretense of birthdays—even for Dawn—there had been calls. Those, too, had eventually dwindled. 

There had been cards, of course… but in the last year they had started to come signed, but super generic; the kind of cards you had your secretary pick out for you and put on your desk for a quick John Hancock on the fly. 

They were, in effect, the familial equivalent of a fruit basket. The expending of a duty, nothing more. Their father tried hard to pretend he didn’t have kids. He had his life, they had theirs. 

Why was he even  _ here? _

“Hey, Sweetie,” he murmured to Dawn. “Long time no see. How’s… school?”

Dawn pulled back, looked up at his face, beaming. “Oh, you know. Weird. High school’s way different than middle school. But I’m totally adapting, even if ours is kinda weird here. They have us in mobile-units mostly, while they rebuild the high school…”

Dad blinked. “You’re in _high_ school?”

/Oh my God; you don’t even know how old your youngest is? What, did you think she just stayed frozen in time where you last paid attention, or something?/ 

At Buffy’s side, Spike had set up a low, sinister sort of subterranean growl. Which was a thing she should head off, ASAP, except she couldn’t seem to focus on anything but the whole, ‘Dad. Dad’s here. Why is Dad here?’ conundrum.

Man, she was spun.

Dawn looked confused. “Yeah, Dad. I’m a freshman. I wrote to you about it, remember?”

“Oh. Right. Yeah. Sorry. I’ve been… really busy with a lot of new cases…” He ruffled her hair, smiled down at her. “Wow. My big girl. A freshman. Jeez. What a mind-blower.”

His eyes rose again to meet Buffy’s over Dawn’s head. “And my oldest is… engaged.” His voice went clipped, hard, his eyes flinty as they passed over Spike’s face, taking in his hair, the scar on his brow, his wine-red, wide-lapeled shirt and dark tee, his patrol-roughened jeans, his scuffed Czech Army boots with their multitude of buckles. “To a man I’ve never met…”

A vast swell of hurt soared up inside Buffy, building till she thought it might choke her. /Let me get this straight. You haven’t even  _ called _ in years, and suddenly you think you have dad-cred enough to believe you have the right to complain about the kind of guy I’m gonna marry? You’d have gotten to know him if you’d have remotely tried to  _ be _ here, for one thing! So where do you get off complaining that you’ve never met him?/ 

How was it on them to hike all the way down to LA and hang around on his doorstep to let him know what was going on in her life, when he hadn’t even made a single effort since she was a teenager? Like, who the damn hell did he think he  _ was? _

In tune with her emotional war, Spike’s growling had tuned up to a low, insistent snarl. 

Normally, Buffy would touch him somewhere, in a silent attempt to soothe him back down to station-keeping. Right now she wasn’t right enough in the head to chill him out, though. She didn’t even have enough chill of her own to deal. “Sorry, Dad. I guess I just didn’t think you gave a damn enough to bother to come out and introduce you.” The words were falling out of her face before she remotely had a chance to consider them. “How’d you even find out, anyway?”

Mom’s eyes flitted to hers, regret and apology filling them.

Oh. It must’ve come out in some phone call during some other conversation. Which made sense, she supposed. Still; ugh.

Dad flinched back, and then his gaze hardened. “Care? Of  _ course _ I care, Buffy! You’re my baby, and you’re only nineteen…”

“Twenty.”

“…And... And you’re crazy if you think I’m just gonna stand by and…”

“You really don’t get a say.”

Dad cut off to stare at her as if she’d lost her mind. “If you think I’m paying for…”

Oh wow;  _ really? _ /Is  _ that _ why you came out here? Because you’re mad I might ask you to spend  _ money _ on a wedding you don’t approve of?/ 

If she didn’t fight she would cry. Accordingly she was on her feet before she could think. “No one is asking you to pay for anything,  _ Hank _ ,” she insisted, flinging one hand away from herself, and watched her father flinch again, away from the rage in her voice. “You don’t even need to be there. I have someone else prepared to give me away; someone who’s been  _ there _ for me this last four-and-a-half years, and who cares about me. Someone who likes and understands my fiancé. I have family who do the same. I have friends who love me. I have a job that more than pays for everything I need, and if he needs to, Spike can also…”

Dad’s lip curled.  _ “Spike,” _ he cut in, disdainfully. “You’re gonna marry a guy named ‘Spike’.”

Buffy sighed, feeling a sudden weariness edge in to drain her of her mad. “Dad, go home. You’re not wanted here. Go back to LA and mind your own business. Maybe I’ll think of inviting you if you leave now and don’t cause a fuss.”

He stared, eyes bulging. “You think I’m just gonna stand by and let you ruin your life when you’re not even out of college…”

Mom cut in then, with a short, sharp laugh. “That’s rich coming from you, Hank, since you and I met at the same age.” 

Dad whirled on her, amazed. “And look how we ended up.”

Mom stood her ground. “I’d put money on Buffy and Spike over you and I any day. You don’t know a damn thing about them. You haven’t been here. I have.”

Dawn had been standing to one side, white-faced, but now she drew herself up, facing down a father she’d been dying to see again for at least two years. “Yeah, you know what? Spike’s awesome and you don’t know anything. If you’re gonna be mean to him then go away, Daddy. I love him. He’s the best; and he’s been here for me.” She held her breath for a second, then let it out, shaky but firm. “You haven’t. And you’re not here to see me now; just to yell at Buffy. So just leave.”

Dad narrowed his eyes. “Now you listen to me, young lady. I’ve put up with insubordination from your sister, but I will not…” 

The front door, which had been left ajar, banged open abruptly, so hard it slammed into Dad’s arm, almost knocking him over. He danced to one side, holding his shoulder and tottering to keep his feet… as Glory strode into the room.

Buffy was ready for battle in an instant, Spike crouching at her side. Glory’s bright, predatory eyes glanced over them, slid over Mom, Dad, Dawn… /Oh God,  _ Dawn! _ / …and passed over her sister without any sign of recognition to come back to them. “Hey there, sweetie! Man, it’s been a helluva day. And here I am, thinking you’re just an annoyance, you know? But I figure… maybe it’s time we have another chat. Maybe you know something about my Key.” She moved past the humans in the foyer to stalk closer to Buffy and Spike. Shoved past them to settle herself onto the couch like a queen on her throne. Lay back, flinging an arm behind her, crossed her legs on the arm of the sofa like it was a royal divan. “You know? Come to the source, since you run this rinky-dink hole.” She waved her fingers around the room. “See, I’m getting really,  _ really _ bored with this shitty place, and I just wanna go  _ home _ , you get me? I need to get out of here. The place gives me the heebie-jeebies. So I figure; you wanna get rid of me, I wanna go.” A tight, sharp glance, filed down to points. “How ‘bout it, sister? You wanna help a girl out?”

A look like that said you either helped, or you got flattened. 

Buffy didn’t bother to spare their embattled family a glance as she tightened her grip on Spike’s wrist. He would know what she wanted. What she needed from him. “Maybe we can cut a deal. Let’s talk. How about we chat; just you and me, huh?” And moving slowly and carefully away from her guy, she headed for the coffee table, shoved aside some of Dawn’s homework, and took a ginger seat on it, leaving Spike behind. /C’mon, Faith. Tell me you heard the yelling, or the ruckus when the door slammed open. Something! Here’s your chance!/ They would need a nice diversion while Spike hustled the family out of here, hid them… wherever.

“So...” Glory began, looking not remotely interested. “This is where the Slayer eats, sleeps, bangs her vampire…” Reaching out over her head, she grabbed up one of the framed photos on the end table that held the lamp behind her. “Cute.” 

Over by the door, Dad made a strangled noise, which… Oh. Right. The ‘v-word’. Last time he’d heard that one, he’d had her thrown in an asylum. 

Joy.

“I can't even stand it,” Glory went on in bored tones, eyes now on the ceiling. 

Buffy slipped a hand behind her back and waved her fingers urgently at Spike. /Get them out of here!/

“Personally? I need more space. But… eh. This is good for you. It's…” She waved a hand around in front of her face, like she was searching for the right word. “It's so quaint, and…”

Her head jerked up abruptly. “Hey! Where’re you going?”

“Get out of it!” Spike hissed, and gave Dad a shove. The door, still hanging wide open to admit any escapees, proved well-suited to the task. Mom and Dawn were already halfway out and heading down the porch steps; in the know about hellmouth rules and obedient to the necessities thereof. 

But Dad, of course, had to be the stubborn one. “Listen. I don’t know who you think you’re dealing with, but I don’t listen to punks who…”

Spike didn’t have time for him. He flashed fang. “Get. Your. Useless. Human. Arse. To. The. Car.”

“Oh my God…” Dad was staring, white-faced now, at the reality of a mythical creature in front of him; the made-up thing his insane daughter had insisted had infested the gymnasium she had had to burn down at Hemery to keep them from spreading throughout the city. The creature whose existence—or, rather, whose non-existence—had been the reason behind his locking his eldest child in a mental ward for two and a half weeks when she was fifteen, to be drugged insensible and bound to a gurney, screaming to the world that she wasn’t crazy. 

“Get the fuck out, you berk!” Spike shrieked, and picked her father up bodily to throw him outside. Then, grabbing up his blanket, he flung it over his head and dashed into the late afternoon sun after him like a smoking comet.

Glory was already on Buffy as she dove for the fireplace and the metal poker there, praying to distract the bitch long enough to allow for her family’s escape. She didn’t get far. One swing… which didn’t even land before the ho had hold of her weapon, was stripping it right out of her hand. “Listen, you stupid girl. If I wanted to fight, you could tell by the being dead already.” 

Buffy flinched, expecting a hard swing that would take her head off; ducked, rolled… And came up in time to see Glory turning, tapping the poker on her hand as she took a seat in the nearest armchair, crossed her long legs. She managed to make the thing look like a throne. 

Then the crazy bitch giggled. “…So play nice, little Slayer.”

Okay, what the fuck? “What do you want?”

Glory lifted her brows, as if the answer was obvious. “Well, I want my Key. Why else do you think I'd come here?” She shot a glance out the door as the DeSoto screeched away down the driveway and roared off toward… Oh. Awesome. He was heading east. Probably to that one cave. 

And this time they would have supplies. They kept the car loaded up these days, with water and snack foods, so this time if they had to hide out from Glory over there in the woods, they’d be able to do it in style. /I love you, Spike./

Glory was pointing her poker at Buffy now. “Not sure why you think I care about your stupid human relatives, or your smelly vampire sidekick.” She tilted her head. “Why are you doing the nasty with him, anyway? Doesn’t the stink bother you?”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “I’m already getting the third degree from my father today about boinking the undead. I don’t need it from you. And besides…” She frowned. “What smell?”

Glory leaned her head back a little on the back of the chair to eye her as if she was crazy. “The bleach. In its hair. Ugh. So gross. I couldn’t deal…”

/Oh my God, are you seriously this hung up on his fashion sense?/ “It’s really not a big deal to me,” she answered blandly. 

“Huh.” Waving it off, the god-beast shrugged and pointed at her with the poker. “Not that it matters. You matter, little girl. See, I think you know where my Key is. And that’s a good thing for you, since that means I can’t kill you till I get it…”

Faith appeared in the doorway from the back hall just then, eyes darting up to meet Buffy’s. She was holding a crossbow. Relieved that her sister-Slayer was awake and around, Buffy was also somewhat concerned that Faith might piss the bitch off before they could figure out how to use this odd parlay to their advantage. “Interesting. So you think I’m just gonna give it to you?”

Glory leaned forward abruptly, flinging the poker away from herself so that it struck the fireplace hard. Three of the bricks crumbled to dust under the impact, which was… wow. Not so great. 

Maybe Xander could fix it? “Listen, you little minx. Maybe knowing where my Key is is the only thing keeping you alive right now! You may be the tiny queen of the vamp world, but to me you’re a bug! You should get down on your knees and worship me!”

Faith was drawing closer, moving with Slayer stealth. 

“But oh, no; you still think it's neat having Slayer strength!” Glory’s voice went high and sing-songy with mockery. “Ooh, big deal! Stronger than humans!” Faith was within a couple of feet by now. “Who isn't? I could crush the life from you as easy as you'd break a nail. But I need the key…”

She swung around abruptly to lift her brows at Faith. And smiled. “Aw, that’s cute. Is that a crossbow? Who are you; the other one?”

Faith took the scare in stride. “I figure, you put us together, maybe we can put the hurt on you.”

Glory turned her back on Faith in a show of absolute unconcern to lift a brow at Buffy. “Seriously. This is the kind of thing I have to deal with in this dimension. Man, do I ever need to get home where people know their place. Ugh. If I have to keep chipping my nail polish and getting split ends putting up with this kind of interruption…” She flipped a hand in the general direction of where Faith stood. “I mean, it’s stressful, you know?” Her eyes zeroed in on Buffy, all irritation. “I just want my Key so I can go home. What’s so wrong with that, really? I’ve been stuck here for _so_ long, and it’s _smelly_ and _loud_ and just plain _icky…”_ Her expression went from crazy-smiley to flat and deadly. “And you really don’t wanna be the thing in my way.”

Buffy held her peace.

Glory swiveled a little to eye Faith over her shoulder. “Hey. You. How close are you two? Like, can we make a deal, here?”

Faith theatrically lowered the crossbow. “What kinda deal?”

/Good. Good. Maybe get more 411 from her. Nice./

“Well, here’s the thing. Your ‘sister’ here took my Key, and she won’t give it back. Which, you gotta admit, is kinda messed up. So, look. I’ve done my research in this town. You go where the power is, right? And I’m the girl with the big, bright, shiny tower of power. You help me out, I’ll put you right up next to me. You just tell me where she put it, and you’re at my right hand, okay?”

Faith scoffed, dropping the facade. “Yeah. And then you bail for your home dimension, and I’m stuck holding the bag with a pissed off Buffy. Been there, done that. No thanks.”

Glory’s wide smile vanished once more. She got all deadly and miffed. Buffy took the moment to break in. “She doesn’t know anything, anyway.”

The god’s eyes flashed to hers, flat and frustrated and ready to strike. “What; you’re keeping the info all close to the vest so I can’t get it from anyone? Dumb move, girlie. I can always torture them all anyway, till you give.” Her eyes flashed pure venom. “See, the thing is, I don’t care; but you do. Sooner or later, you’re gonna crack if I grab ‘em one by one. And you can’t protect everyone.”

/Oh God ohgodohgod…/

“I'll kill your vampire. I'll kill your mom, I'll kill your friends... and I'll make you watch while I do.”

/Oh, like hell you…/

The bitch didn’t even skip a beat. She just sighed wearily. “Just give me the Key. You either have it, or you know where to find it.” And she pushed herself to her feet. “Obviously, this is a one-time-only deal. Next time we meet, something you love dies bloody and slow. You know you can't take me. You know you can't stop me… so I’d think fast about how you can help me get out of here.” Another smile, flashed in hot-red slut-fire lipstick. “I’ll be gone and you’ll be happy. How is that not a win-win for everyone?”

And she was sauntering to the door. Through. And out, into the slanted, late afternoon sunshine. 

“What the fuck are you  _ doing _ , B? Let’s fuck her up!”

Buffy was shaking all over. “I need to get them out of town," she murmured, as the realization struck her right between the eyes, settled slowly into her gut with deadly, agonizing force. " _ All _ of them.” It didn’t matter anymore. It didn’t matter who did or didn’t know about Dawn. 

Glory was going to come after everyone anyway.

“B, what…”

Buffy swung on Faith, her voice a low, urgent whisper. “Dawn’s the Key.”

Faith stared at her… and then shook her head and tossed the crossbow aside onto the ground. “The hell she is. I watched that little shit grow up!”

Buffy headed for the door. It was gonna be a long jog to the cave. Luckily, Glory was long gone, wouldn't see which way they went... “No, you really didn’t.”

“Buffy, what the hell are you talking about?”

She was already running, Faith trailing her at speed. “If you wanna know, you better keep up.”

***

Once again she could hear them before they got anywhere near the cave. “…Gonna have the chance to watch our tape before Monday comes and we have to record over it. All I’m saying is, if Timmy’s really dead…”

“Oh, no worries, Joyce. You know she can just sew him back together. He’s a  _ doll _ , for God’s sake!”

Mom’s voice settled into relieved tones. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. And there’s no way they’re gonna go through with the wedding, so…”

“Oh my God, you two, with your stupid soap opera! Did you see that crazy chick with the hair, and… She’s such a  _ slut!” _

“You know, I’d tell her to watch her mouth, but she really did seem like kind of a slinky… Is that the one you and Buffy have been fighting, William?”

“That’s the one, Joyce. Right bitch, too.”

“Oh God, I hope Buffy and Faith are alright…”

“I can’t believe you’re sitting here… talking with this… This… monster…” Dad’s voice was shaking. 

Faith snorted in wry amusement. “Who’s that dope?”

Buffy made a face. “My father.”

“Oh.” Faith looked even more amused at that. “So… not taking the fiancé thing well I guess?”

Buffy didn’t bother responding to that as they rounded the corner. 

Dad was standing on the far side of the earthy little chamber, back against the rough wall, dirt scattered over his hair and the shoulders of his blazer. He had his palms spread against the sweating stone, and he was staring at Spike wild-eyed while his ex-wife and youngest daughter cuddled up to ‘the monster’, cozy as you please. 

Buffy shook her head as she pushed into the space. “I thought you didn’t believe in vampires, Dad,” she reminded him as she headed toward her family. “Hey. How is everybody?”

“Oh, you know,” Mom answered a little shakily, “we’re in a cave, hiding from some crazywoman. So, fine.”

Dawn blinked up at her. “Dad’s kind of gone nuts.”

Buffy nodded and leaned forward to give Spike a peck on the lips. He grinned as she disengaged, clearly enjoying the ostentatious display of affection. “What happened with Miss Crooked Arse Two-Thousand?”

Buffy tightened up, shot Faith a glance. “She threatened everyone I ever knew or loved with painful torture and death till I handed over the Key.”

“Well… shit.”

“Yeah.” Buffy looked down into her hands. “I’m thinking road-trip.”

Spike disengaged from his girls to stand and join her. “That’d be the hell of an enterprise, pet. Didn’t those wankers say this bitch’s deadline isn’t till May? Which lines up with what that one madman said.” He glanced back at Mom and Dawn, expression anxious and doubtful. “That’s the hell of a long time to run about tryin’ to play keepaway with a god.”

“Wait…” Mom called, also standing. “Buffy, what are you…”

Buffy faced her mother over Spike’s shoulder. “I need to get you, Dawn, everyone I love out of Sunnydale. And we need to go  _ now _ .”

Mom stared at her as if she had lost her mind. “Buffy, I can’t just leave everything behind and run away. I have a _business!_ And neither can Rupert or Anya! And you have school! So does Dawn! So do your friends! Or they have jobs, or…”

Just, no. “Mom! Did you  _ hear _ me? Glory will  _ kill _ all of you…”

“Then just give her what she wants!”

Buffy swung away. “You have no idea what you’re saying.”

“Well, Buffy, I suggest you inform me why I have to leave everything that’s important to me, lose my business, leave my home, uproot my existence and my teenage daughter’s, because some... _woman_ with too much makeup thinks she can barge into my house and…”

Buffy grabbed Mom’s arm and pulled her aside. Nodded at Faith. 

Faith nodded back, went to Dawn. “Hey, kid. C’mere. Let’s go over to the entrance, get some air.”

“Oh, that’s smooth,” Dawn answered, clearly irritated. “Like I can’t handle the big, important 411.”

Ignoring them, Buffy caught Spike’s eye and dragged Mom back toward the rear of the cave. 

Dad didn’t do anything. He simply remained frozen against his wall, round, pampered face slack with horror and fingers gripping the soft stone as if he hoped that he could somehow sink into it and disappear. His eyes never left Spike; probably in the hopes that if he kept an unblinking gaze on ‘the monster’, he could escape this bad dream intact.

Spike ignored her father to join her and Mom in the low-ceilinged area near the rear. They would have to talk quietly. There would be echoes, otherwise. “It’s time, pet?”

She met his gaze, nodded. “It doesn’t matter anymore, who knows. She’s coming after everyone.”

“Yeah.” He sounded deeply regretful as he turned to Mom. “Mum, I need you to hold tight to my hands. Bear down as hard as you need to, because this is gonna hurt worse than anything. But we swear to you that it’s true.”

“Okay, now you’re really scaring me.”

Buffy sighed and touched Mom’s shoulder. “Mom, that woman who came into the house today? When I said they were coming after my family, I was being very specific. And now I’m gonna be even more specific.” She lifted her eyes to Spike’s, because, dammit, this really was gonna hurt. It still did for her; a long, slow, deep ache in the bones. It might never go away. But it had to be done. Glory had pushed them into a corner. “She’s after Dawn.”

Mom frowned, thrown. “But… Dawn was right there, and she didn’t even…”

Buffy shook her head to cut off the protest. “She doesn’t know she’s after Dawn, thank goodness. She’s… The thing she’s searching for is in disguise. It was sent to me because I’m the Slayer, and they knew, this ancient order of monks, that if I thought of it as a member of my family—someone I loved—that I would protect it with my life. So they made it from my flesh and bone; from my blood, and gave me—gave all of us—the memories so we’d accept that…” She trailed off. It was too hard to say it.

Mom was staring at her in horror. Then she looked away, down at the cave floor… and said something Buffy absolutely did not expect in the slightest. “When I… was sick. Right before the surgery, when I was having weird balance issues and everything, I would get these funny flickers. They felt like dreams, intruding on reality. I would get the strangest thoughts. I felt so bad about it; put it all away, because no way I should ever think such things…” Her eyes rose, met first Buffy’s, then Spike’s. “But it felt like knowledge. Like… truth, you know? Even though it didn’t seem possible.”

/Oh, wow./ Did the tumor make it possible for Mom to see past the illusion the monks had put on everything, the way the Cloture spell did for Buffy that one night? “What did you see, Mom?” she asked softly.

Mom shook her head, looked away. “I’ve felt so awful. Like this horrible person, because I had this sneaking feeling that… That she’s not… mine.” She bit her lip, glanced up at them from the corners of her eyes. 

/Oh wow./ She had thought that her mother would freak out at her, throw rage, tell her she was insane all over again. Had braced herself for it, with Dad right there to agree that they had been right to send her to the asylum, that… 

Who knew that damn tumor would’ve made it so much easier to explain something unexplainable, insane, impossible?

Buffy did not want to feel grateful to a cancerous growth. “I’m sorry you’ve been dealing with this all alone, Mom,” she whispered.

Spike was stroking Mom’s hand, gentle and supportive. “It’s the hell of a shock, Joyce. We were there, a couple months back. No one wanted to believe it…”

Mom looked down at their joined hands. “She still belongs to us. And she’s… important. To the world. Precious.”

Buffy nodded, startled at her mother’s insight. “Yeah,” she whispers. “That’s why Glory…”

Mom flung up her free hand, forestalling any further explanation. “She’s ours, and she’s as precious to me as you are. That’s all that matters. We’ll take care of her.” Tears had started in her eyes; glimmered there, in the low light. “You know… she still feels like my daughter; no matter what she is. So… we’ll take care of her. And you, and Spike; you’ll keep her safe, right? Because I know you love her the way I love all of you.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, Mum.”

Mom nodded, closed her eyes, exhaled a long and shuddering breath. “Okay. So you’re saying this is why we can’t just hand over…” She shook her head. “Because what she wants…”

“Is Dawn.”

Another tight nod. “So… you want to leave. Because she’s…”   
  
“A god,” Buffy whispered. “We’ve tried to fight her. She’s wiped the floor with us…”

“They haven’t tried with me, yet,” Faith called, reentering in pursuit of an irate and impatient Dawn. “Look, can’t we give it a try, just once, before we bail? I haven’t even got a shot at her yet.”

Buffy made a face at Faith. “We don’t have the firepower. And we don’t know where she’s holed up…”

“Don’t we still have that bazooka thing of yours, from back when you took out that one thing, right after you banged Angel…”

Dad’s eyes bulged even wider. “Ba… Bazooka? And who is Angel? Buffy, just what the hell…”

Buffy ignored her father. Right now he was kind of inconsequential, along with his fears and his questions. “Well, Xander still has it under his bed, but you know, it’s not like we have ammo for it…”

Faith grinned. “Well, lucky for us, I have this nice soldier beau in my back pocket…”

She had a point. Buffy glanced back at Spike. “Well, at the least, it might slow her down a little. You think you could maybe follow her scent for a ways? Maybe we’ll get lucky and it won’t trail off this time. We can swing by the Magic Box, pick up the hammer. Faith can bazooka her ass, and then we can smack her around with the big meat-tenderizer for a while till we figure out what the hell else we plan on doing with her?”

Spike grinned broadly and swung on Dawn. “You. Niblet. Stay. There’s plenty of snacks. You leave this cave before one of us comes back, you’re never leaving the house again.”

Dawn shot him a sullen glance and sank back against the stone wall to the tiny outcrop there, crossing her arms. “Sure. Fine. Whatever.”

Mom watched them, alarmed. “And if it doesn’t work?”

Spike caught her hand, lifted it, kissed her knuckles. “Then I guess we’re on for that road trip, Mum.” And he turned back to Buffy. “Best I meet you at the house, pet. Don’t want the scent running cold, innit?”

“Alright. See you there ASAP with the hammer.”

He dropped a fast kiss to her mouth. “You and Faith take the car.” And he was off.

Buffy kissed Mom hurriedly on the cheek, tried for the same with Dawn, got a lean-away and a frown. “Oh, jeez. Chill.” 

“Ugh. You’re all being so secretive, though. What’s that about?”

Buffy sighed and turned away. “I’ll tell you when you’re older,” she muttered, and prayed they’d get that chance. And she headed for the exit, Faith at her side.

“Wait,” Dad exclaimed. “What’s going on? Buffy! What are you… Are you just going to leave us here in this… In this  _ hole _ in the ground while you… What’s even… BUFFY!”

Buffy swung back on her father, shot him a sweet, deadly smile. “You can try to throw me back in the looney-bin later, Daddy. Right now I have to go save the world from all the things that go bump in the night. You know; the ones you insisted don’t exist?” And turning her back on him, she headed from the cave.

And realized only when she was back out into the early twilight, that she was shaking all over. 

“He threw you in the nuthouse?” Faith asked, and there was a new note of commiseration and respect in her voice as she matched Buffy’s gait through the scrub oak and sparse undergrowth. 

Buffy didn’t answer, but she did speed up a little. 

“And here I thought you were just daddy’s little girl all this time.”

She shifted her hands on the grip of her stake. She hadn’t even realized she was holding it. /Yeah, well… I sure tried be, to calm his suspicions. To make him love me again. But it didn’t keep him around. He left me anyway./ And damn if she hadn’t realized till now how utterly pissed off she was about that. How nauseously angry, how viciously betrayed.

“Hell. And here I thought my family was fucked up. Guess all that picture-perfect shit’s just on the surface, huh B?”

Buffy felt her face twist as she loped toward the parking lot. “Nothing’s ever what it looks like, Faith. I figured you knew that.”

“Yeah. I guess I shoulda.”

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_De Nada_ = you're welcome (Spanish)  
  
And we're finally going on the offensive!!! (i haaaaate how cool ideas are only used once in episodic TV. If it worked once, use that shite again!

Don't EVEN get me started on how Willow's 'making a portable sun' spell could've been used in the finale, instead of sacrificing Spike.) But anyway, yeah. We'll see what an antiaircraft/antitank bullet does to our friend Glorificus...


	33. Chapter 33

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, here's where I went wildly off-script, because I was mad at the folks at Mutant Enemy for neglecting a previously-used solution because, I dunno? The shine was off after they used it once before? 
> 
> I thought it'd be fun, and at least buy some time, and you know, be maybe a little LOGICAL. But apparently it was only good enough for a gag, later. ARGH.
> 
> Anyway.  
> (PS, I swear I'm gonna carve out some time for answering people's absolutely gorgeous, heart-explodey comments! No school for kiddos means no time for adults! And then I was dumb and got myself roped into writing a Secret Santa fic, which will be up in here soon, and there's the other two posting WIPs, and a prequel fic, and omg wth did I get myself into... *sweats*)

“Which window do you think it is?” Faith asked as she hefted the rocket launcher to her shoulder. 

Spike narrowed his eyes at the tall apartment building. Frowned. “Willin’ to bet it’s top floor. Bitch like that won’t take less’n the penthouse.” 

Buffy made a doubtful face. “We can’t take the chance of blowing up a civilian, though. Can you see anything? One of those creepy little leper-things, or… like, a bunch of red dresses or anything?”

Graham made a pained hiss. “I’m definitely gonna get court-martialed,” he whispered sourly.

“Maybe not, mate,” Spike answered, and straightened. “Just saw a wee git in a robe pass in front of the window.”

Buffy kissed him behind the ear. “I love your enhanced vampire eyeballs.”

“Get some use out of bein’ a hunter yet.”

Faith flicked on the laser sight. The pencil-thin red beam shot out, cleaving the darkness to touch the side of the building. Rose, till it vanished in the lamplit window. 

“Make it count, Faith. I’m not sneaking out with more anti-aircraft shells for you. I’m a big fan, but this was a lot.”

“Oh, don’t worry, cowboy. I got this.” She settled the bazooka a little better, scrunched down to get herself all comfy on the berm, and squinted. “Anyone see the bitch in there, or just her minion-y guys?”

“Where the hell else could she be?” Spike asked, sounding rhetorical. 

“Out taking the night air…” Graham muttered grimly.

“Any road, make it quick, before one of those bitty gremlins sees the pointer and warns the bitch…”

“Got something red!” Faith announced, and tugged her trigger.

The familiar  _ boom-whap _ of the gigantic launcher was a lot louder when you weren’t behind it. The recoil knocked Faith back off the little berm, sent her tumbling backward, barrel of the huge gun in her lap. “Damn, that’s hot!” she exclaimed, and tossed it away from herself.

Buffy was already up; staggering, ears ringing and numb as she pelted for the apartment with the vast hammer slung over one shoulder. Spike was right on her tail as she careered around the corner, past the smoking crater in the upper wall, the rubble below, through the glass doors of the entrance. She almost fell over, her balance was so off, but she made it to the stairs intact. “Elevators probably aren’t working!” she screamed at Spike, waving her hands to get his attention.

“Probably best not to use the lifts, pet!” he yelled back, eyebrows blackened, face looking slightly sooty. She mostly understood him around the edges of the words, the form of them on his lips. 

She staggered on the bottom step, almost fell backward. He caught her with a palm to the small of her back and gave her a shove to start her off.

They were upstairs faster than Buffy thought possible, considering she wasn’t at her best, and wheeling down the hall to the door at the end. She swung the hammer overhand to bang the suite doors open. They fell like the panels were made of ornate plywood.

They found themselves standing at the edge of a crater. 

The room, once beautifully appointed, was a smoking ruin. A pillar in the center leaned crazily to one side. A huge, round bed tilted drunkenly on three legs, its mattresses askew. Furniture was blown all against the back wall opposite the door. One whole side of the room was a bombed out abyss, open to the night air of Ruggs Field. 

Scattered all around them were bodies of those little, scabby, robed minions. 

Buffy didn’t see Glory anywhere. 

She headed right, Spike headed left, their eyes casing the room, seeking any flash of red, of blonde hair. Poked into the kitchen, the bathroom. Came back… and saw one minion, staggering as he dragged a body out through the disaster of the former front door. A body in a red dress, with terrible burns on it. But no long blonde hair. And it seemed… shaped wrong, somehow. 

Buffy lifted the hammer in clear threat. “Drop her.”

The minion froze, stared at them in dread. And then it grabbed the body, threw it over its stocky shoulders, and bolted.

Buffy and Spike stared at each other briefly… then gave chase. 

And were amazed at how fast the little asshole could run. Short legs churning like a robed locomotive, it made it all the way down the hall to the elevator before they could catch up… and wouldn’t you know the damn thing was still working? 

The door closed right in their faces. 

“Well, shit.”

Buffy was already heading for the stairs. Spike trailed her, muttering to himself. “Weird as hell, that.”

“What?” she demanded, puffing as she headed down. “Take this; it’s heavy.” At least she had her balance back.

He relieved her of the hammer, still muttering as if he was dealing with some sort of mental constipation. 

“What’s your problem?”

“Dunno. That body was all wrong. Almost looked like a bloke’s, not a bird’s.”

Buffy made a face at the steps in front of her. “You’re high.”

Spike shook his head, covered her hand with his as they alighted at the lobby. His eyes were on the elevator, just as hers were. “Smelled like a bloke, too. Didn’t smell like god-bitch at all.”

“Well, that’s weird,” Buffy agreed, and waited.

The doors dinged. Opened.

On nothing.

/Well, shit./

***

They searched the entire building. There was no sign—or scent—of Glory, anywhere in there. They grabbed one of the other minions who had survived the blast, dragged it down to the Magic Box to demand it tell them if it knew what the hell was going on, but it just played dumb. And since it was bleeding from its ears when they picked it up, maybe it  _ was _ at least deaf; who knew. 

It also seemed to have internal injuries, since it died like a day later. Which solved the problem of what to do with it, but was kind of sucky, too, and made Buffy feel a hair guilty for not trying to get it medical attention or something. She hadn’t even thought of it, which was just… bad.

She really hadn’t been thinking clearly. They were too busy doing stuff like mounting a round-the-clock on Glory’s building and stuff. Even Graham joined in, somehow obtaining leave-time to do it—or maybe he was just terrified to go back to the base in case someone found out he’d relieved the Army of an anti-aircraft missile—along with every one of the extended Scoobies. Even that kid Andrew pulled a shift, under observation; but Glory never showed up again. 

And the population of crazies in the mental ward of the hospital abruptly hit the skidders. 

“Do you think that actually got her?” Buffy asked anxiously of the group. After all, it was all their lives on the line at this point. They all needed to be polled on what she had called, slightly facetiously, ‘the Clash question’; “Should we stay or should we go now?” (Her wordage had made Spike groan so loud he’d almost busted something.) 

“I dunno, Buffy,” Xander answered, and drilled one finger into the wood of the Scooby table off to one side of the Magic Box. “I mean, I don’t wanna get tortured by a god, much less get dead. But I’m also not too big on bailing out of my home and losing my job if I don’t have to, either. If she’s not dead, it seems like she’s at least out of commission for a while, right? Like we have a little breathing room to, I dunno; come up with some anti-hellgod spells or… something?” His eyes darted wildly from Wil and Tara to Jonathan and Anya, then bopped up to Giles. 

Giles sighed and adjusted his glasses. “I too am loath to tuck tail and run when to do so would be to lose everything. My investment here is not entirely sound as yet. I am sure Joyce and Anya would agree it would be a terrible financial risk; both for their partnership with me as well as for their own endeavors, since I most certainly have not yet recouped the original losses garnered with purchasing and remodeling this shop.” He paused briefly, and everything in his face tightened, his eyes not quite touching on Mom. “However, the other is also a risk too frightful to bear considering…”

Mom winced and looked away, down at her folded arms. Dawn was in the back, doing her homework. She had no idea she was under discussion. 

Actually, no one in the group knew yet that Dawn was under discussion, except the people who were already in the know. “Isn’t there some… spell you can do to find out?” Mom asked. “Some… god-finding spell?”

“We tried,” Willow murmured, sounding defeated. “We got nothing. We should’ve got some indication, one way or another, but it’s almost like…” She shook her head, frowning into space. Obviously the inadequacy was still really hitting her hard. Which Buffy got, since being ‘the magicks powerhouse’ of the group was kind of her thing these days. Being unsuccessful probably felt like she’d failed or something. 

Buffy leaned her way, reached out to touch her lightly on her upper arm. It wasn’t like she hadn’t tried. Not everything could possibly be successful.

“It’s like there’s…” Tara glanced around the room, looking as if inspiration had struck. “It’s kind of like when you’re bouncing light off of a mirror. You can’t feel the light, and you can’t tell when the light starts bouncing. It looks like it goes  _ into _ the mirror, you know? Like the mirror’s… permeable. But almost like… the mirror gets hard in there somewhere, and that’s when the light bounces away. So you’re pretty sure something’s there… but you can’t tell  _ where _ it is, if that makes sense?”

Buffy straightened, concerned. “If there’s something to bounce off of, it means she’s not dead, right?”

“Well, uh, not necessarily,” Jonathan put in. “It could just be an old glamor over something that… doesn’t exist anymore. Sometimes really heavy spellwork hangs out even when the, uh, target is no longer available.”

Spike looked suddenly frustrated by all this magick-talk. “Look. Why would a god need a glamor? Wouldn’t she want everyone to know she’s about? Get her due worship an’ the like?”

Faith made a derisive face. “She didn’t seem very god-like to me. She sounded like kind of a poser.”

Anya shrugged and reached out to tug a glazed donut out of the box. She made a show of inspecting it, as if ensuring it was worthy before she took a bite. “Maybe it wasn’t her that did the work,” she mused. “Maybe it’s part of her being exiled here, that no one recognizes her godly majesty. That’s the kind of thing I’d do if I was going to curse a god; put her in a human body or something like that. It would be exceedingly irritating for something that powerful, to trap her in a powerful glamor she couldn’t escape, and stick her in a human shell.”

“Wow,” Andrew spoke up, sounding shocked. “I wouldn’t want to be the guy who did that. That would really piss her off.”

“Yeah, well… didn’t the Council say it was her fellow gods who cast her out?” With a shrug, Anya took her bite, chewed for a while, glaze shining on her lips. “Probably they’re not very worried,” she wrapped up, “since they’re both gods themselves, and not here.” Summary ended around what was left of her swallowed mouthful, she shrugged in a blase fashion. “It’s actually pretty masterful. It’s the kind of vengeance I’d love to do to a few peers; or, rather, former peers, I guess I should say.”

“Great,” Xander put in. “They pissed her off and then dropped her here, and saddled us with her skanky ass.”

“She’s pissed off, she’s stuck in this dimension, she wants to go home and fight the other gods who exiled her and… glamored her into a human body. And now we just blew her up. Which means, if we didn’t manage to kill her, we really, really ticked her off worse. I’m still feeling bail,” Buffy announced. “But… I hear what you’re all saying about uprooting everyone for months, with no end in sight, so… I’ll settle for waiting a few days to see if she shows her ugly face again. As long as we don’t see any signs, maybe we’re alright.” She turned to Faith. “We better keep an eye on the hospital, if you’re down…”

“Sure.” She shot an elbow out to catch a silent Graham in the belly. “We got that.”

Graham nodded slowly. 

Buffy turned back to the magicks corps. “You guys; keep on with trying to find or make any anti-god spells, you know? Maybe focus on the glamor thing? Maybe it’s a weakness, or something…”

The magicks team all nodded. Willow’s expression, though, sank into deep thought. “Maybe if we can figure out how to tear the glamor from her… If it’s linked to the body…”

Tara stared. “That’s  _ awful _ , Willow!” she protested.

Willow winced, then sighed. “I mean, this is war, and she’s a god. If we can’t stop her any other way…”

“But you’d be ripping a… Well, not really a human, but someone in a human body, to shreds…”

“But instead of a soul, we’d be tearing out this alien god-form who’s basically animating this otherwise empty body, right? So no harm no foul. It’s just like staking a vamp, really. I mean, maybe she could still hurt us as a disembodied ghost-thing, but at least…”

Tara looked distraught, but nodded. “It sounds really… negative, but I guess… If we have to…”

Jonathan looked a little uncertain as well. “You’d have to delve into some pretty nasty grimoires to find a spell that would… you know.” 

Giles, too, wore his expression of distaste. Off came the glasses.

Andrew, though, looked kind of excited. “That actually… sounds kinda cool,” he muttered. “Do you think there might be something in the  _ Geldanian Compendium _ about…” He trailed off when Giles’ glasses went back on, focused a glare on him. “What?”

“We’ll fine-tune later.”

“Oh.”

“You know, this kind of thing was exactly the sort of thing I really liked when I was in vengeance,” Anya mused, sounding a little nostalgic. “Those were the good old days.” Her eyes rose to Willow’s. “No wonder Hoffy thought you’d make a fine demon.”

“Okay, ew.”

“I’m just making an observation.”

“So anyway,” Buffy broke in, “we should get back. I need to… I dunno. Figure out what we’re gonna do for the next few days, till we know…” /If we ever  _ can _ really know for sure./ And that was the hardest part. 

“Also gotta figure out what the hell to do about your father, love.”

Buffy blinked at Spike, thrown. And spun to stare at Mom. “We did bring him back, right?” It would be  _ so  _ bad if he was still back there hiding out in that cave.

***

Dad didn’t say much when they got back to Revello. Mostly he avoided looking at Spike at all. He seemed terrified to be in the house, but also terrified to leave it. “Is that… woman… going to come back?” he whispered when they told him everything was quiet for the night.

“Not that we know of,” Spike answered cheerfully, because he knew he was being avoided, and he liked to push things. While Dad was still flinching he half-turned his head to speak over his shoulder, eyes still on the other male in the room. “Gonna go shower, love. Need to get the rocket fuel off my face. You coming?”

“Probably need to talk to Dad for a few, first,” Buffy admitted with a sigh, and scrubbed at her own thoroughly blackened face. 

“Not to mention, house rules?” Mom reminded them, brows lifted pointedly. 

“Oh. Yeah. Right,” Spike answered shamefacedly. “Surely. House rules.”

“Buuuu-sted!” Dawn sing-songed as she darted past them up the stairs. She paused then, hanging off the bannister about three steps up. “Uh, in case you head back tonight, it was, um, good to see you, Dad.” And she kissed the top of his head where he stood, poleaxed, near the newel post, then ran away to vanish before her father could burst the bubble by speaking at all.

Faith was chortling as she wandered past them into the kitchen. “‘House rules’?” she demanded, sounding incredulous. “They actually follow  _ rules _ , Joyce?”

“Oh, probably not. But they’d  _ better, _ ” she went on, shooting them both a pointed glare, “at least when I’m  _ here _ .” Shaking her head wearily, she followed Faith through the dining room. “I need a glass of wine.”

“Nice. You got anything stronger than that?”

Mom paused to eye the other Slayer once, up and down, then a weary sort of look overtook her. “No. But you’re welcome to join me.”

“Well, hell; guess it’s better than nothing…”

They vanished into the kitchen.

Buffy felt her features twist as she turned to face down her father. “You can stay the night on the couch if you want, Dad, but it’s probably safer with everything that’s going on here in Sunnydale right now if you just go home. We’ll have this apocalypse wrapped up one way or the other by the end of May, just like every other one before it, then we’ll be safe to have our ceremony. We’ll let you know the date, and you can decide if you’re gonna come and be peaceable.” 

Dad’s mouth worked for a second, though no sound came out. His eyes glanced off of Spike once or twice without quite landing, and then… “Buffy, can I speak to you alone?”

“No.” /Nope-nope-nopitty-nope. With nope-sauce./ 

_ “Buffy _ …” His tones were anguished.

“ _ Dad _ . You locked me up in an asylum because  _ vampires don’t exist. _ You stopped talking to me because I was your crazy daughter. You left me and Mom…” /Shit./ “…And Dawn because you didn’t want to deal with me. But guess what? You were  _ wrong _ . I’ve  _ outgrown _ you; and this? This is my world.” There was a rising tide in her, of old anger, of pain, and rage, and lasting hurt that had been screaming to come out for years, and it had found its release tonight. “And you know what, Daddy? You’ve removed yourself from it. So you don’t get a say, because you don’t have a part.” She bit it out, all the pain of canceled dates, all the betrayal of forgotten phone calls and ‘sorry, I can’t honeys’ burning in her like a pyre. “I’m not gonna play your sweet baby girl so you’ll maybe love me again, because it didn’t work. You’ve stopped loving me. You were already scared. You’ve stayed away. And you know something else?” She held out her wrists, facing up, fingers curled inward. “You can’t lock me up anymore if you don’t like it, and you can’t tell me I’m not  _ allowed  _ to be what I am.”

“Buffy, you burned down your school! They were gonna press _charges!_ And then you ran away up here, vanished into thin air for months! Your mother begged me to help look for you! I told her you were seventeen and you could fend for yourself, but she  _ begged _ , and I spent I don’t know how much on PIs looking for your butt, all up and down the state for a month and a half, before we gave up. Do you know how much we worried? Do you think I was going to try to get close to you again, after that? You might just run off again, or…”

Buffy felt mildly guilty for about five seconds, but no. He didn’t know her life. He hadn’t remotely tried. He had disengaged long before Acathla. Hell; he’d been pulling away before she’d met Merrick, like he hadn’t been sure what to do with a teenaged girl; how to relate to her or whatever. She had cloven to her first Watcher’s slow-blooming, backhanded approval like a flower in spring, because of it, making his loss even more painful than it had needed to be. Making every betrayal from Giles harder than it had needed to be. 

And, her Cruciamentum had been twice the hell it had needed to be because of what he had done to her when she was a fifteen-year-old kid. “I’m sure you could have fought harder for me when I was younger. And guess what? Things would’ve been a whole lot different when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen…” Searching for acceptance, desperate for love from older men, seeking for any possible hold over them to keep them close, at any cost… and utterly devastated by their loss.

She felt Spike move up close, press himself just there, at her left… and felt ready, for the first time, to tell her father the one thing that she had needed to say since the day he had first truly walked away. “No, Daddy. I’m safer  _ here _ , with Spike at my side,” /The one who stayed…/ “living in a town full of vampires and other demons, than I ever was in your home, where my own father would rather throw me in the nuthouse than just  _ listen _ to me.” She shook her head in disgust and turned, Spike moving smoothly with her. “Go home to LA, Dad. Thanks for the visit.”

He was dismissed.

Dad didn’t say anything to her turned back. He was gaping, maybe. Maybe horrified. And she found… she hardly felt anything about it, about whether he left or stayed. Not anymore.

Spike, though, did. He ran his hand down between her shoulder-blades, a silent question; a ‘you alright, love?’ She nodded, let him feel that she was. For now, she was. Maybe later she might fall apart in his arms; but not now. Not with Dad here to see it. 

“I bloody well love you, Buffy,” he told her, his voice vibrant with it. 

“I know it,” Buffy answered as staunchly, and caught his hand on the upstroke to pull it over her shoulder; to kiss it, lean her cheek on it. “I love you back.” She sighed heavily, started for the couch. “And I need to finish that paper.”

He pulled her to a halt before she could move to sit. “Oh, leave it, pet. We’ll wrap it up tomorrow, yeah? How the hell you’re supposed to finish this semester in the midst of a soddin’ apocalypse is anyone’s guess.”

Buffy smiled into the dim, unlit living room, then turned to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, looked up into his eyes. “Well. I have  _ you _ , right?”

Blue eyes sparkled on hers in the twilight. “Hell. Put a boatload of pressure on a bloke…” He sighed in his turn, dramatically, and pouted so big his lip almost ran off on its own. “Joyce an’ I are never gonna have time to watch Timmy get hisself stitched back together, are we?”

“Oh jeez.” She grinned, loosed an arm, reached up to touch the protruding feature. “Look at that lip. Gonna get it.”

“Aw. Come an’ get it, then, Slayer.”

She flashed him the headlights. “Don’t dare me…”

“Not darin’ you.” He was twinkling at her in earnest now, mischief in his eyes; shot a swift, conspiratorial glance in the direction of the kitchen. There was a  _ tinking _ noise in there as glasses were moved around, maybe a few murmurs from Mom and Faith; probably interested commentary about the daddy-daughter show. “Think Mum’s goin’ on a bender tonight. You can get more’n my lip if we make it upstairs to the bathroom without anyone catchin’ us…”

“Oh, you wish…” Lunging up, she caught his lip, and the rest of his mouth, as he joined her in a hungry kiss. She thought maybe she heard a strangled noise from Dad, but she wasn’t really paying much attention right now to anything but Spike.

When she eventually broke away to catch her breath, he was groaning against her. “Christ, pet, I thought tonight that…”

“I know,” she whispered back. “Let’s head upstairs.”

“Yeah. I’m all over rocket fuel anyway. Hardly the sort of look a man likes to wear to please the love of his unlife.”

“Oh, please. I’m wearing  _ eau de _ rocket launcher too…”

“Dead sexy on you, luv.”

She turned, catching his hand to lead him past the foot of the stairs and up. “You think  _ guts _ are sexy on me.”

“They bleedin’ well are!”

They passed her father, who was staring at her as if he couldn’t figure out who she was, had never seen her before. “Night, Daddy,” she told him brightly as she passed, and waved at him with her fingers as she dragged Spike along behind her up the steps. “See you tomorrow. Or not.”

“Would say it was a pleasure to finally meet you, Henry Summers,” Spike growled as he made his own circuit, “but since it’s only the girl’s pleasure keepin’ you alive, all you’ve done to hurt her, best I can do is say piss off.”

Dad went all pale; kind of the color of that putty the drywall guys used to patch the holes in the walls at the Magic Box. Buffy tried not to giggle, since probably her father had been through enough hard shocks tonight. “Be polite, Spike.”

He made a derisive sound. “Since when am I ever polite, Slayer?”

She paused to glance back down at him, pretended at a moment’s thoughtfulness. Shook her head, started up again. “Well… in honor of it being Mom’s house?”

He pretended to think it over. “Well. For Mum’s sake, then.”

She started again, giving his hand a tug. “C’mon, slowpoke. I want that shower.”

As they made the head of the stairs, they heard Mom’s voice drifting up from below, sounding weary. “So, Hank. Should I make up the sofa, or are you heading back? And if it’s the first one, please call Maddie, because I really don’t want to have to put up with her calling me at five AM to demand to know if I’m trying to seduce you back into my life. As if I’d ever be that insane.”

/Eee./ Buffy hadn’t realized there was that kind of vibe with Dad’s new chickie and Mom. Ew. 

“Joyce!” Dad hissed, sounding horrified, “You just…  _ let _ her…  _ be _ with that… That…”

Buffy pulled Spike to a halt and half-turned to listen.

“My  _ son-in-law _ ,” Mom answered in scathing tones, “is a godsend. I wish to hell he had an older brother. Maybe if so, I could turn back time and run into him a few years ago, pass up some of the ones I wasted on you.”

“An… older…” Dad sputtered.

“Well… maybe not older,” Mom cut in, amusement now framing her tones. “I guess all the good vampires are taken…”

Buffy sputtered at Mom’s dramatic, mournful sigh. Spike started to snicker, almost choking trying to keep it quiet. 

“Oh well,” she blew it off, turning abruptly cheerful. “I suppose it would be a little weird, dating my daughter’s brother-in-law. I’ll make do with Brian. He’s very knowledgeable about art… and so far as I can tell, he’s a gentleman.” She paused briefly, then turned brisk-with-a-touch-of-hard. “Sofa? Or making tracks? Going once…”

“I’m leaving. I can’t  _ believe _ what’s going on in this… In this madhouse of a town, but…”

“Oh, I hear LA’s just as bad. They just hide it better. To hear Buffy’s ex tell it—the  _ first _ vampire she dated, by the way—they get plenty of business in their paranormal detective agency to stay in the black. Fighting demons, throwing off curses, tussling with a demonic law firm, that sort of thing…” She ignored Dad’s choking noises to pull the door open; or at least that’s what it sounded like by the familiar creak. “Drive safe, Hank. Thanks for the visit.”

Spike had his face buried in the crook of Buffy’s neck by this point, in a vain attempt to muffle his speed-cackle. “I bloody well love Summers women,” he informed her.

Buffy gave his forehead a shove. “C’mon, giggly. We have about thirty seconds to make it into that shower before we get caught.”

He was still snorting with mirth as he stumbled into the tiled room behind her.

***

A few days passed. Every spell Witches Incorporated threw at their problem came up with a solid zero. And the population of crazies in the mental ward of the hospital remained at station-keeping, with new admissions dying down to a trickle. 

It really started to seem like maybe they’d, in Spike’s terminology, ‘done for the bitch’. 

“Man, and I didn’t even get to slap her around any,” Faith muttered disconsolately.

“You’re not missing much,” Spike told her, dancing backward to avoid Buffy’s front-kick.

“Except the migraines,” Buffy put in cheerfully, and ducked a wicked right cross. “I dunno; it just feels… too easy somehow. Like something’s still hanging. If we can’t be sure… we can’t be sure. And besides; since when did we stop an apocalypse in  _ January?” _

“Didn’t have one at all last year,” Spike pointed out, and rolled on his shoulder; a stealth run under Faiths high-kick, came up beneath and behind her, aiming for the back of her head. Faith whirled, got him just over the right ear. “Fuck. Mean, there was that thing with the louts who tried to throw their own carcasses into the hellmouth, I suppose, to open the bloody thing last winter…”

“You gotta watch your right better, Blondie.”

“Soddin’ Slayers…”

“Yeah,” Buffy agreed, and clocked Faith a good one, right in the face, while she was busy focusing on Spike. “And I guess there was the one where the hellmouth came awake, turned into Maurice, and tried to eat us all in the middle of the school year that one time…”

“Jesus, B. You have some power behind those now. Nice.”

“Thanks. Your…  _ Shit _ . Kicks are serious when you…” She had to skip out of the way to avoid losing a lung to a broken rib. Damn; if these regular three-way sparring sessions were accomplishing nothing else, they had to be tightening them all up. 

“Thanks yourself.” Faith danced away, looking jazzed.

“Hellmouth turned into a man-eating plant?” Spike asked, sounding interested, and popped up and down on the balls of his feet. Dove over a headstone to avoid a jab from Buffy, came up with grass in his hair. “When was this?”

“Oh, that was when I was in and you were out, big guy,” Faith informed him, and sent a few lightning-fast jabs at Buffy’s face, causing her to roll right and come around in an attempt to buckle the back of her sister-Slayer’s knees. “Some ‘cult of Jhe’ or some shit. You know. Standard, ambitious, end-the-world garbage.” She frowned then, looking thoughtful as she rolled in her turn, forward and away from Buffy to come up and spin, on her guard and fists up. “Hell. That was January, B.” Her hands dropped. “There’s your precedent. Or two, I guess.”

Buffy subsided, dropping her fists and breathing hard. “Yeah, I guess.” She still felt unnerved, like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. “I just don’t feel right about it.”

Spike had, too, lowered his guard, and joined the unspoken cease-fire to rub the back of her neck with his night-cool hand; a comfort-in-lieu-of-ice for her overheated flesh. “Spidey-sense still tinglin’, is it love?”

“I dunno.” She leaned automatically into his body, seeking reassurance in the darkness. Looked out into the night, frowned. “I guess it just feels too… up in the air. There’s nothing definitive, you know?”

Faith snorted dryly as she turned to pick up the jacket she’d left slung over a nearby grave marker. “Hell, that rocket felt pretty damn definitive when I pulled the trigger, B.”

“I remember,” Buffy murmured in agreement. Shooting the Judge with that thing had felt like… Well. Nothing else. Just the enormous shock of it, the sheer firepower… /No wonder boys like toys like that./ 

“S’pose it could be that the bitch is at least bad enough damaged she can’t come at us. In which case, maybe she’s set back badly enough she also can’t do what’s needful for her…” Spike halted, tones going impatient. “Wankers ever say what they thought she meant to do?”

“Not really,” Buffy responded, and pushed off of him to cross the three or four feet of ground necessary to retrieve her own jean jacket. “Just that they thought maybe there was some sort of ceremony involved, since there usually is for a dimensional-gateway-opening of that magnitude.”

“Well. Maybe she’s too fucked off to manage it, or can’t with all her ruddy little Jawas turned to smoking corpses or summat. Who the bloody hell knows? Any road, long as the mental ward stays the same, we’re likely in better shape than we were before, innit?”

Buffy remained pensive as she shoved her arms into her sleeves and picked up her abandoned stake to reseat it in her waistband. “Yeah. I guess so.”

***

It was a routine patrol. At least, till they ended up in a footrace. Damn, those Gillangi were fast. You’d think something made of mostly jelly couldn’t move like that. Like, what was a land-invertebrate, anyway? Shouldn’t something like that just… stay in the water? 

Maybe it was the twelve or whatever tentacles that helped it bail at fifteen or twenty miles per hour. It was definitely the tentacles that left the trail of slime Buffy kept slipping in when she was trying like hell to follow the thing in the dark.

The third time Spike had to help her back to her feet, he was for sure starting to get upset about it. “Faugh!” He shook his hand out vehemently in a useless attempt to shake off the sticky secretion now permanently pasted to the back of her jacket. “Just let me track it, love, and stop sodding slipping in the shite, yeah? I love you more than the sun, the moon, the stars in the sky… but you smell like a rotten clam right now.”

Buffy was already jogging again. “And people wonder why I find you so devilishly charming,” she puffed.

“No one said I wasn’t honest.”

Faith was chuckling as she drew up behind them. “If this is how you talk your game, vamp, I’m not sure how you ever landed her. Girl likes to be romanced, not told the truth…”

“Hey!”

“I’m just sayin’, B; trash-talk’s not your jam.”

“She can hold her own, Faith,” Spike interrupted, amused.

“Oh yeah? Man, I’m just imagining the pillow-talk now…”

“Faith?” Buffy breathed, not-quite-winded in trying to keep up conversation and pursuit all at once over seven or so miles. “Shut up.”

She was answered by a throaty chuckle.

They did eventually catch up to their perpetrator, resumed their battle with the sticky creature; a fairly brainless thing that had absorbed three townies in its mindless search for sustenance before it slowly recognized it was, in turn, being pursued and fled from the stimulus of ‘predator!’

It was easy enough to fight it once they hacked off a few of its extrusions. After all, it seemed to be having trouble with them now, since it couldn’t slap them with its arms and drag them close to try to eat them. At least, not with all the sticky being taken up by leaf-litter and et cetera mulch it had picked up during its career through the woods. Once it was down to only a couple of limbs, and those being used largely to prop it up, they just had to figure out which bits on the ‘body’ were meant to be eye-buds, mouth… cavity? And other organs, and which to attack. No idea what was its most vulnerable spot, since it was a little like fighting a snail (ie, it kept sloshing around and squishing into different shapes and changing on them, and once it almost got its… absorby-hole on Spike’s head, which, Buffy would be listening to him bitch about the goop in his hair for at  _ least _ a month)… but eventually they managed to figure out what the hell they were doing enough to get it to stop moving. 

They watched for a few minutes, panting, but it didn’t seem disposed to do the worm thing and re-extrude anything, much less start over. Which was good, but still. /Who lets a thing like that out of its home dimension, anyway? And then sets it free from its cage or whatever, turns it loose on an unsuspecting populace?/ 

Buffy had a sneaking suspicion she had some heads to knock together in the black-market demon-pet-trade tomorrow. “Well, that was…ugh.”

“Dammit; that thing oozed all over my boobs. And I think my jacket’s permanently fucked up.”

“I’d commiserate, Faith, but I’m still in mourning. Bloody fuck, my hair. How bad is it, Buffy?”

Buffy rolled her eyes so hard she thought they might fall out. “A, there’s such a thing as showers, and Graham’s not gonna care if your boobs got anointed. If he still thought you were hot when you came back covered in Garaltan feces that one time…”

“That’s ‘cause he saw how I got ‘em,” Faith bitched. “You don’t see the battle, then it’s just coming back for a roll smelling like used seafood…”

“Seriously, pet; can we save the hair? If I have to shave it off…”

“Oh my God.” Buffy grabbed her guy’s head and jerked it down in front of her eyes, none too gently. “We’ll do our best. Jeez.” She shoved him away, shaking her head. “You’re both prima donnas. I’m covered in the stuff too, but you don’t see me whining…”

“Well, it’s not in your hair,” Spike muttered under his breath, all testy.

“If you make me tell you you sound like Angel…”

That earned her a gelid glare. “I will  _ end _ you, Slayer.”

“I’m just saying.”

He stopped bitching, but the glares remained, fierce in the night. 

Buffy shrugged and made to turn away, to head home. She would’ve tried to find something out here to clean her sword, but that was probably a loss till they could get back and dig up something stronger than leaves. Like maybe… oh… gasoline, or paint thinner.

By the time they got back her fingers were going to be glued to the thing with dried snail-vomit or whatever.

“If I have to burn this jacket, though, I’m gonna throw down with the bitch who let that thing loose, is all I’m saying. I’ve had this thing since before I started slaying.”

/Oh, jeez; here we go again./

“You’re not kidding. I can feel the fucking stuff hardening on my scalp. And we only get a new head of hair once in the year, if that.”

“Oh, yeah? Is that why Angel’s so obsessed with the do? I swear to God, that guy spends more time fucking with his hair than I do. He primps like a thirteen-year-old girl.”

Spike guffawed. “I knew I liked you, Faith.” He sobered then. “Yeah, we grow it slow. You can change it up if you have the patience, but there’s a reason I’ve stuck with one look since seventy-seven, more or less. And if you weren’t great shakes at growin’ facial hair when you were turned, then you never will grow it. That sort of genetics sticks, becomes permanent. The great forehead went and tried to grow a mustache once. Lucky for him, he had the genes on his side. Managed it, but it took him a solid decade to get a decent one.” A low chuckle. “Should’ve heard him bitch about it during the middle bit, when it still looked seedy, till he got it just so. Christ, if that wasn’t five years of hell with the pissant.”

“Huh. So you don’t ever have to shave?”

“Bloody useful, innit, without the mirrors?”

“Huh,” Faith answered again, clearly fascinated. “But Angel does?”

“Summat like once every three, four months or so, I reckon. Easy enough to manage by feel, after all these years, even without Darla about to do it for his moody arse.”

Buffy screeched to a halt when she caught the flicker in the woods, flung her arm up to shut them both up. They cut off like she’d turned their taps. “This is all very fascinating,” she hissed, “but look over there. What’s that?” 

They followed her gaze. Buffy felt Spike’s tension shift inside her, all but heard Faith still to readiness.

It could be a campfire; just a couple of kids having a kegger or something. But you never knew, on the hellmouth, and they were pretty far out in the middle of nowhere. Better safe than sorry. “Spike. What do you hear?”

A short silence, after which Spike’s answer was tight, sharp. “Go carefully, pet. Think that’s more of that Byzantium lot. Hear armor rattling. Mention of ‘the Beast’, and ‘the Key’.”

/And the hellmouth wins again./ There was no such thing as coincidence in Sunnydale.

“Well, fuck,” Faith muttered, and hefted her ooze-covered sword in her slime-smeared fist. “Guess we get to play swords and armor again.”

They snuck as quietly as they could toward the fitful glow… and yup. It was a campfire. But instead of a bunch of dumb kids, it was those three knights, all hanging around like they’d missed the train out to act as extras for that one movie Spike loved so damn much; the one that terrified Anya.  _ The Holy Grail  _ or whatever it was called; the one with the killer rabbit. They were all standing around the fire in a circle… chanting, of all things. They sounded all sonorous and religious, and almost exactly like any other weird cult Buffy had ever taken down, only human. Which was, by the way, bizarre. /Man, can this year get any stranger? And when do they smack themselves in the forehead with hunks of wood?/ 

They could just walk off, let the movie rejects stick to their campout. Or, alternatively, she supposed, they could bore them out of town. It would be easy enough. They’d just have to send Andrew over to freak out at them for hours about that one fantasy movie he was constantly yakking about with Jonathan, the Lord thing. Maybe he could drive them off by spouting stuff in that one made-up language--Elvish or whatever--and ranting about how the big event was less than a year away. 

Of course if they did that, they might miss the chance to ixnay another set of enemies.

Oh, well. It was worth the chance in Buffy’s books. 

She stepped out into the circle of firelight. “Hey. Not to interrupt, but…”

Three heads snapped around to stare. Three swords flashed as they were unsheathed in her direction. Three men crouched into battle-stances. 

“…Woah, there, Lancelot. Hang on. We have something to tell you boys. Thought you should know, as far as we can determine, Glory’s dead.”

The three soldiers remained unmoved. Not even a flicker. Finally, the dark-haired one spoke. “You cannot kill the Beast. Not with any earthly weapon.”

“Well, she looked pretty blown up to us, last we saw her. And she was being carried out of her digs by one of her little leprechauns. She wasn’t moving. She didn’t smell like she was there at all to my vampire; and she hasn’t reared her ugly head since then. Oh; and the mental ward in our local hospital hasn’t seen any new patients in the past two weeks, so…”

The knights exchanged swift glances, then resumed their ready stances. “You may believe this indicates a victory; but against the forces in question, there can be no victory through strength of arms. Perhaps with spellwork and…”

“We’re using that too. We have our magicks circle working on it twenty-four-seven, looking for traces of her. So far, no dice; just the remains of her glamor-thinger. We’ll let you know, if you want, if anything comes up…”

The dark-haired guy sneered. “You still protect the Key. The Key must be destroyed, to be certain the world is safe. You who protect it are our enemy.”

Buffy wanted to scream in frustration. “Are you even  _ listening? _ We bombed Glory! She’s either dead or completely incapacitated! The Key is way safe, so why are you even  _ on _ this still? Get over yourselves! Go home!”

Dark-hair glared, eyes a vicious sea of zealotry and hatred. “Why do you shelter that which does not deserve your protection? It is but a  _ thing _ . It is evil. It exists outside the sight of God. Destroy it, and do God’s will.”

Buffy shook her head. “Okay, weirdo. So… you still wanna fight; is that it? Man,” she finished, in a weary aside to her two backers, “and here I thought I was doing them a favor, giving them the 411.”

“They are a stubborn lot, I’ll give ‘em that,” Spike agreed grimly, and set himself at her left.

“They’re dicks, is what they are,” Faith opined, and swung her sword in a circle, waiting.

When the knights rushed them, the relatively open ground made things a little easier than the closed alley had done. The fight ended quickly. They shortly had all three idiots knocked out and laid out on the leaf-litter; two with only minor cuts and bruises, though dark-hair, unfortunately, had ended up with a pretty bad set of burns because he’d flung himself right on Faith at one point with his dagger in one hand and sword in the other, and she had had to twist away hard, which had tripped him up so that he had fallen into the campfire. Idiot. He’d ended up with burns on his face, neck, shoulder, and hand, where the surcoat and the under-padding thing had caught fire under his chain mail; burns in the shape of the little rings digging hotly into his flesh. Ow. 

Once the three dopes were all unconscious, Buffy shrugged and, at a loss for anything else to do, called 911 to get paramedics out there to pick them up. While they waited for the medics to show, they stripped the bodies of all the goofy  _ Monty Python _ -looking armor and weapons and hid them with their own in a nearby thicket so there wouldn’t be awkward questions. 

They couldn’t do anything about the weird tattoos on the dudes’ foreheads, but that was the hellmouth for you.

Eventually the trio of knightly dipshits were transported to the hospital via the gurney-to-ambulance pipeline, and the white-hats could finally retire for the evening. “Gah. Now I have dried goop  _ and _ people-soot rubbed into my blouse,” Buffy griped as they hiked back toward the distant intersection where they had first run into the tentacled thingie, watched it digesting its first human meal. “And I’m guessing,” she hinted, shooting a glance at Spike through her periphery, “that there’s no way we’re bringing this stink into the DeSoto?” They had had to beat feet after the tentacles, leaving the car behind, which meant it was just sitting there, idling, or had been stolen if there was any demon dumb enough to take that bait (though, Buffy doubted it, since most denizens of the town knew to whom that car belonged). Or maybe by now it had run out of gas and gone dead. 

“No way in hell, Slayer,” her vamp responded. “Though, we need to turn her off.” He shot her a faintly amused glance. “Joinin’ us in the whinging, is it love?”

Buffy plucked at her once-ecru blouse, now stained with a large, blackened handprint, and sighed. “Fine. I’m falling to the common denominator.” Turning, she spread her hands wide to encompass the other two. “Tonight officially sucks.” 

“Hear bloody hear.”

“You’re damn right, B.”

“And I’m taking a shower with the hose before I go inside.”

“Well, I dunno as I’d go that far,” Spike amended, looking a bit wild-eyed at the prospect.

“Wet t-shirt contest?” Buffy wheedled.

“Well...”

Faith went from amused to fondly exasperated. “If you fuck on the lawn, get all the slime off first. That shit can’t be good for your skin. I don’t even wanna think about the infections…”

“Okay, ew.”

“Just puttin’ it out there. Speaking of…” Faith reached two delicate fingers into her tight jeans pocket, slid her phone out, flipped it open, hit a speed-dial number. “Hey cowboy. I need a shower, then have I got a story for you… Yeah, I can tell it to you naked. Hell yeah. Heineken. Always preferable. Nice. See you in about forty-five. Sweet.” Popping the phone closed with her chin, she shrugged. “Got that boy  _ trained _ .”

“Sounds like it.”

“Yeah. I’ll keep him around.”

Buffy held back a smirk.

***

“So, Armor-Boy One’s in the burn-unit,” Faith informed them, swinging into the Magic Box the next day. “The other two are gonna be out in a few, unfortunately. But you know; just bruises and shit, so it’s not like they were gonna be in for long. ‘Course, since none of ‘em has insurance, not sure how they’re gonna pay for their little stint under modern medical, but that’s their problem…”

“Maybe they have a parent organization that’ll locate them,” Giles pondered, and whipped off his glasses to blink at them as if they had offended him somehow. When he shoved them back on, he looked kind of inspired. “One wonders, if they do, if we can get into the records afterward and find out if there is some sort of related, ancient Knights Hospitalier still in existence, or…”

Spike scoffed. “Spreading the coffers wide to pass the florins about, is it?”

This aside earned Spike a glare. “Oh, do be kind and let a man think, you berk.”

Spike spread his hands. “Be my bloody guest.” And he leaned back against the table and crossed his arms, looking superior.

Buffy considered elbowing him, but figured it would only encourage mutiny and the sort of scholarly repartee Spike would absolutely deny he was engaging in in the first place. “So, if he’s in the burn unit…” she thought out loud instead.

“Oh yeah,” Graham inserted. “He’ll be in there for a coupla weeks, at least. He’s got second and third degree burns on his face and neck, his hands. The armor protected his shoulders and side alright; those are first and second, mostly…”

Willow looked impressed. “Did they really just…  _ tell _ you all that?”

Graham shrugged. “You’d be amazed what nurses will tell soldiers when you say a guy is a veteran suffering from PTSD.”

“Man. They really need to pay attention to that new law where they can’t just share people’s medical records with every Tom Dick and Harry.”

Xander, who was looking at Graham with some admiration, straightened and swung back to his bestie. “What, so you can go back to being hacker-girl? I thought you were more into magicks now.”

Willow looked thoroughly stung. “Hey, I can still hack! Speaking of, I’ll keep track of our dude if you want; see where he is, when he’s being released. The other two, too.”

Buffy felt oddly relieved to hear Willow talk about using computers for something. It had been a way long time since she had. “Great. That’d be great, Wil. I’m sure it’d save Faith and Graham a lot of footwork.” And when had Graham become such a satellite of the team, anyway? Huh. 

He was really kind of useful, for an ex-Initiative jerk. “Alright, so… Knights, check. Nothing new on Glory, check.” Buffy shrugged. “Nothing much new on anything, really.”

Spike grinned. “Since we seem to be hitting a lull… I was thinkin’, pet. You wanna go shopping?”

Everything inside Buffy ground to a halt. She swung around to stare at him, feeling like she couldn’t quite breathe. “You mean…  _ shopping _ , shopping?”

His grin deepened to a telling smirk. One eyebrow shot up in instigation. “I do.”

Buffy whirled. “Meeting adjourned. See you all later.” Back to Spike. “I’ll meet you in the car.” And she headed for the door.

“Um, okay, did we just get completely deserted, or is it just me?” Xander complained behind her.

“Totally deserted,” Tara agreed cheerily.

“Wow, that was… abrupt,” Jonathan murmured, sounding startled.

“I wonder what they’re shopping for?” Andrew asked the room musingly.

“Oh, please; don’t ask!” Willow exclaimed, her voice laced with horror.

Faith chuckled low and throaty. “Bet I could guess.”

Spike was at Buffy’s back as she exited. “Don’t let your mind wander too far, luv. Won’t be confirmin’ any guesses.” And he crowded close to Buffy’s back as he reached behind them to pull the door closed.

Before it shut entirely, Buffy just barely heard Anya’s voice call out, “I’m willing to take bets…”

/I so don’t want to know what they’ll come up with./

As Spike settled into the driver’s seat next to Buffy, she found herself literally vibrating with anticipation, woven through with a minor amount of anxiety. “What if they throw me out?”

He turned the car over, put it in gear. “Never happen, pet.” And he pulled away from the curb with smooth, practiced economy.

“As long as you’re sure.” She did her best to settle back against the seat, but she was a buzzy mess. “Um, who’s buying? And how much does this sort of thing, um… cost?”

Spike grinned in a feral kind of way as he wove them through traffic, heading south toward Willy’s. “Depends on what we get. And, we can share it out, love.” He flicked her a glance. “I predict once you get inside and settle down past bein’ embarrassed, you’re gonna see more than just the one item you’ll want to try.”

“Oh.” Buffy blushed furiously and fell silent.

Kr’vd’s turned out to be a sort of hole-in-the-wall storefront down past Willy’s, where Main and Tauamount crashed into each other right before the trainyards. It was such a hole-in-the-wall, actually, that Buffy had never even once noticed it was there before. There was a small, neon sign that proclaimed nothing more than its name, buzzing in and out of existence over the hollow of a plywood-covered window, which in turn was papered over with what she now realized were ads for… 

Oh. Escorts. Except… not a one of those escorts was human. Well. /Shows how much I’ve been paying attention./ 

There were also ads for what looked like a titty-bar somewhere nearby that was demon-run, which… “Uh… So, there’s really a whole side of town that I just didn’t, um…”

“Figured to handle it myself, not make you toss tables down here, pet.”

“Uhuh.” Buffy glanced over at his face, studied his profile. “To save my virgin sensibilities?”

He looked slightly uncomfortable. “More to save you getting your arse pinched humiliatingly by drunken sods as should know better. And, you know, to save their lives, since you’d kill ‘em if they did.” He shot her a swift, hunted glance under beetled brows. “All in the name of diplomacy, yeah?”

Buffy frowned, but gave in after a moment and exhaled heavily. “We’ll let go of the part where somewhere deep inside you’re probably not a huge fan of some Gorakh grabbing your mate’s ass…”

His answer was immediate. “Not a fan, no, but you can bloody well take care of yourself if one did.” He huffed slightly. “I’m no fool, Buffy. I know better than to think you couldn’t.”

His loyalty, his admiration of her solo strength brought a smile to her face, as always. “Well, I appreciate that. But just so you know, I wouldn’t be mad about it if it pissed you off. Just a little.”

His truculent expression faded, to give way to the faint beginnings of a grin. “Well… good. Because I would be. Somewhere in the background where I wouldn’t be gettin’ in your way while you lopped off the blighter’s hands.” And he held out his, the faint smile inviting her as he tilted his head toward the black-painted door next to the neon. “Coming, love?”

Buffy pulled in a deep, fortifying breath, and nodded firmly. “I’m a big girl. I can do this.”

“Sure you can. Without even a blush, and holdin’ your head high.”

She flashed him a smile for his corresponding pep talk, and informed him quietly, “This time, you go first, though.”

He chuckled low as he preceded her through the door.

She followed him in, uncaring that it set a precedent power-wise. This wasn’t a negotiation. She wanted him to absorb the first glances from the room as they entered. It would give her time to look around his body, take in the ambience before she had to focus on who might be staring at her, or face anybody down and not-blush. 

As a strategy, it worked pretty well; especially since Spike seemed pretty buddy-buddy with the person behind the counter. “Evening, Tauvin. How’s business?”

“Hey, Spike,” a thick voice answered; one Buffy recognized, dammit. Not that the demon community was all that massive or anything, so the odds of it being someone she didn’t know were so way terrible, but still. Dammit. “Hey, Slayer.”

Shit; she’d only gotten the briefest of glances around the space before she had to have an adult conversation about coming to a sex-toy-shop. 

Vague images of videos flashed past her eyes into her brain, of naked persons—some in demon aspect, some human—as she pivoted unwillingly to return the greeting. “Hey, Tauvin,” she managed in a voice that amazingly didn’t shake. “How’s your day going?” Inane, but at least she hadn’t said anything super idiotic.

“Oh, you know; sit here, wait for someone to buy something, rent something, blah blah. Lookin’ for something in particular? We got a new series in.” He nodded with his chin toward the middle of the room. “Freestanding shelves; might be up your alley. All vamp-human stuff…”

Spike saved her from going up in flames by waving off the offer with one hand. “Not here for media, Tauv. Wanted to head into the back room.”

“Oh. Sweet. Go on in, then. If you need the stool, it’s in the right-hand corner closest to the door.” And he bent his crusty, antenna’d head over the magazine he was perusing, which, Buffy noted a little distantly, wasn’t a titty mag, but some kind of nerdy thing with spaceships on it that screamed in big, bold letters, ‘AVP On Track To Be Biggest Release Of Year Says Pro-Gamer’.

Keeping a tight hold of her hand—probably to make sure she didn’t bolt as much as to offer moral support—Spike guided her past the counter, past all the myriad, shoulder-height towers of video-cases, all anonymously white, with cheap photos slipped under their plastic covers showing demons doing things to each other, and humans doing things to demons, and demons doing things to humans; things that…

Buffy flinched away, tried very hard not to look anymore; at the video covers, much less at the posters tacked around the room high above the tall wall-shelf-units. There were just some things she had never wanted to think about… and some things you couldn’t unsee once you had seen them. Which meant not seeing them at all was really just the best policy.

Was there really an actual industry where people, like… volunteered to  _ do _ that? On  _ purpose? _

“Please tell me the… um… actors are free in these. Um, volunteers, not in slave rings, or… Because if…” She almost didn’t want to know, but now that she knew the industry existed, she  _ had _ to know…

Spike’s voice tightened, and he paused in the doorway leading to some darker room. “Didn’t used to be. Mostly are now. A few bad ones here and there, just like there’re still people bringing slaves into the country. Trafficking, shite like that. But the biggest industry center’s in LA, and people like our boy Angel jump on the shite ones.” He gave his head a quick jerk. “Hell; it’s big enough business now to have the lawyer-boys involved, so you know his blokes are on it.”

“They aren’t really Angel’s people right now, are they?” Buffy murmured sadly. “But… I’m glad to hear it.”

Spike squeezed her hand. “Wouldn’t’ve brought you here if it was the other way about. Know you.”

He really did. And, time for a subject change. “What’s in there?”

Her question bought her an incredulous look. “What we came here for, pet.”

Buffy eyed the doorway for a second, then squared her shoulders and shot him a brave smile. “Well, let’s go, huh?”

“Love you, Slayer.” And he led the way into ‘the back room’.

If the front of the sex shop had been a lot to deal with, the rear of the store was… an education. 

One whole wall was covered in things like whips and riding crops and other… punish-y things. There was another wall that seemed dedicated to restraint systems, all of them demon-specific, and screaming with legends like, ‘Made By Real Krovakaan Sorcerers, Accept No Substitutes!’ and ‘Guaranteed Escape-Proof!’ (Some of the advertising was mildly worrying, and Buffy was at least fifty-percent sure that a few of her choicer adversaries had probably shopped here before attempting to kick off their various apocalypses, but you know.) 

There were gags. There were Soft, Teasy Things and Sharp Poke-y things and various sizes and shapes of something that looked almost like… penis-cages?

“Don’t be lookin’ at that, love. I’d do a helluva lot for you, but that’s a step too far.”

Buffy made a sound that was almost an explosion. “I  _ wasn’t _ thinking…  _ Who _ even…”

“Let’s just say there’s a level of being owned that takes all the fun out of it, from my perspective.” Spike shrugged and kept on walking. “Not to shit on anyone’s party. If that’s their kink, more power to ‘em.”

“Wh… I don’t…”

“Now here…  _ This _ is what we came here for.” And he caught her shoulders, gave her a little quarter-turn. 

Buffy found herself face-to-face with a vast wall of false penises, abundant in their variety, both in size, shape, color… and species. Which was alarming, from her perspective. 

Luckily, they were mostly grouped in that way. By species. 

Buffy very quickly did a walk-by of most of the wall to settle in front of the mostly-humanesque ones. Though, to be fair, there was a certain flair in design among them as well. “Um…” Turning away, she stared at Spike, at a loss. “This is so your call. You’re the one…” She waved her hand inarticulately.

He snorted. “We should maybe settle on one you might like to use later as well. Could be hours of mutual fun, love. Doesn’t just have to be for the one thing, the one time.” 

Buffy blinked at that. “Oh. I didn’t think… of that.” She shook her head, laid determined hands on her hips to pin him with her eyes. “Still. Narrow it down for me.”

He pursed his lips. “Right. Then, this size…” He pulled one down, held it out for her perusal. “Girth-wise, I mean, pet. Length doesn’t matter much, long as it’s this or more.” And he shot her a devilish grin. “Too little’s a tease. Too much is… entirely up to you and what you do to get me all warmed up.”

Buffy stared down at the object in her hand, feeling a little numb. It was, oh, a good eight or nine inches long, about as big around as Spike himself on a good, fangy day, and was he  _ insane? _

“Oh, and we’d best get one with a base. That way, later on if you ever feel interested in getting frisky, we can buy a harness.”

She lifted her gaze to his, at sea. “Huh?”

“Never mind, luv. Longer discussion. So, what do you think? I’ll leave the rest up to you. Color, texture… Though, the more the better, obviously, when it comes to that. For the both of us.” He tilted his head slightly, did a little tongue-action, and waggled his eyebrows. “I’d maybe say not so much texture as that Tofflan one over there, o’course…”

She jerked and almost dropped the dildo she was holding, her eyes drawn to the next bank over, where the scaled object in bright, fluorescent green seemed to scream its intent to act as someone’s personal cheese-grater. “Uh, yeah, no.” Fumbling to put back the one she held, she took a deep breath to settle herself, gave herself a quick, stern talking-to (something along the lines of ‘grow up, you’re a big girl, seriously, jeez!’) and turned to peruse the items on offer in what she hoped was a businesslike fashion.

“Okay,” she finally informed him after a second, and reached up as high as she could to tickle down the one she thought would be perfect for the job. It was stupidly purple, for one, which seemed wildly unthreatening. It was approximately the right size, for another. For a third, it had the base thing Spike had mentioned, which, whatever; and anyway, it would give her something to hold onto. Fourth, instead of even really looking like a human appendage, it was sort of built like a series of bulges piled one on top of the other; kind of like a stack of fat, smooth rubber rings with a few strategic striations here and there for… friction, ending with a flaring, stylized cockhead. 

She kind of thought those bumpy ring deals would feel good on just about anyone, sliding around. “What do you think?”

Spike’s lips twitched in that way that said he was fighting to keep a straight face as he took it from her, looked it over with a firmly studious expression, then he nodded. “It’ll do just fine, love.”

“Okay.”

She started to turn for the door when she was arrested by the next panel; the one freestanding to her right, in the middle of the floor. “Oh.” 

“What is it, Buffy?”

Her hand rose of its own accord, reaching out to touch, as a chime of recognition tolled through her. /Oh, wow./

Drawing even with her, Spike peered around her hand, and tilted his head again. “Thought you’d find something else you’d like,” he mentioned, a faint note of amusement in his voice. 

“You don’t…” She was shook, and really wasn’t sure how to make him understand. “It’s almost exactly like the one you were wearing in the dream.”

He straightened beside her, amusement fled. “Oh, yeah?” he asked then, a little more carefully. “Well, that’s interesting, innit?”

Buffy ran caressing fingers down along the collar, the tips of them bobbling slightly over soft black leather, into the deep red grooves where the one layer had been laid over another, stained red, underneath. The bottom layer showed through in ornate, filigree patterns, like leaves and vines; gorgeous designs of living, climbing stuff that could either consume or hold up, depending on circumstance or preference. 

It wasn’t even really a choice when she lifted it, took the item off its hook and turned to him, the question in her eyes.

“I wear that for you, Buffy,” Spike told her softly, “you have to know what it means when it’s on.”

“What does it mean?” she asked him as softly. “Tell me.”

He reached out to touch the leather, feeling inside. She followed his fingers, checking to see if it was soft or rough. It felt conditioned, not cheap. Smooth and mobile. It didn’t have a horrible dye smell or anything, and the stitches weren’t sticking out all over the place. It wasn’t a piece of crap, but well made, at least. 

He nodded and slid his hand to the sturdy buckle, fingering it, eyes rising to hers. “It would mean that I would be giving up the keeping of myself to you, when I was wearing it. That you would be taking me on; be responsible for my care, because it would in no way be a consideration for me. The only thing I would be thinking of would be you; how to serve you. It would be on you to tell me when to stop; when to care for myself, and how. When to be still, when to feed, when to rest, when to move… because wearing it means I exist only for you.”

/Oh./ She nodded, pulled her gaze away for a moment to look down at the thing in her hands. And realized, with a faint regret, that it was unnecessary. “So, it’s like… a visible command.” 

His hand dropped away. “In a way, but…”

She turned, moved to reset it on the hook. “Then it’s not…”

To her surprise, he forestalled her with a swift movement. “But not. Because it’s by choice. It’s a game.” When her eyes rose to his, startled, he smiled, and the look in his eyes was beautiful. “It’s a serious game, but it’s a game nonetheless, Buffy, and that makes it… so much different. I get to decide. It gives me the power, in the end; the same way you were really the one with the power when you let me bind you. I get to  _ choose _ to serve you… and at any time I can take it off and say no. And just knowing that? That’s sodding  _ therapy _ .”

“Oh.” Realization and understanding flooded her. /This would do for you what that night did for me./ “Okay.” Pulling the collar back, she held it for a second again, traced her fingers over it. “And do you think it would be… comfortable?” She didn’t just mean this particular one, though she meant that, too.

“Yeah,” he answered immediately. “Here and there.”

She nodded. “Alright.” She met his eyes. “It’s so beautiful. God, it’s gonna look gorgeous against your skin. With nothing else…” She hadn’t let herself think of it yet, but now that he…

An image slammed into her, stunning in its clarity, of his body straining up from the bed, this collar around his neck, and him otherwise naked, his cock hard and desperate, while she told him he had to wait just a little longer to come…

A viciously powerful lust exploded in her, so overwhelming that she almost staggered. And she was abruptly so wet that she was going to have a hard time walking out of here like a normal person, and she needed… “Oh God…”

“Oh fuck, pet; oh hell…” He had her pulled up hard against him, and thank  _ god _ , he was giving her something to grind against for just a second, because she needed the relief. “Fuck,” he whispered hoarsely into her ear, and shuddered. “Turns you on that much, does it?” he asked, and nipped her earlobe.

_ “Apparently…” _

He released her so fast she almost got vertigo. “Right then. Stay right there.” And he was striding off across the room, back toward the wall where all the restraints were, and what…

He whipped something off the wall at speed, and was back in about two seconds with whatever he’d grabbed, had her hand. “Think maybe we should head back home soonest and try some of these things out, love,” he told her quickly, voice harsh, and they were hustling out the door.

“What did you…”

He lifted his other hand. Trailing from his clenched fist were some kind of straps, with a dangling tag on them, twisting and turning with the wind of their passage. She thought she caught the words, ‘Bed’ and ‘Spelled’ and ‘Mage’ and ‘Comfort’… but that was all.

/Oookaay…/ 

Spike was apparently getting ideas of his own.

They reached the counter. He slapped down the restraint-y things and the Unthreatening Purple Dildo, nodded at her to set down the Very Pretty Collar. Reached out, nabbed a bottle of lube from the counter’s display and slapped it down hard next to the rest of the stuff while Tauvin was still coming off his two-chair-leg-recline to set down his magazine, looking all startled. “Uh, hey. Did you, uh, find everything…”

“Yeah. Fine. Great. Ring us up, yeah? We’re in a hurry.”

Buffy blushed for the first time, and fumbled in her back pocket for her wallet. They were going halvsies, after all. No clue what the total would be, of course, but…

“Leave it, pet. Whatever your part is, you can make it up buying my next several rations of snack foods or some bloody thing. This is faster.”

/Wow, Mr. Suddenly In a Hurry!/

The register dinged and rang, and why wasn’t Anya working here, anyway? She should at least find a way to get a part-interest in the business. It was all about sex, so she could talk about her favorite subject all the damn time, and look at the  _ totals _ they got. Holy jeez, this stuff was expensive! 

“Here. Keep the change. We’re off…”

Tauvin was still shoving stuff into a bag for them. “Uh, here, don’t forget the complimentary coupon for a night at Ronko’s; free drinks with every…”

Spike wrapped his arm around the unmarked sack and waved off the coupon. “Do you honestly see the Slayer letting me spend an evening in Ronko’s? Much less sitting in?”

“Hold up. Is that the one bar?” Buffy turned to Spike, hand held out for the coupon and eyes glittering. “Might make for an interesting date-night…”

“Oh, Christ… Give it to her, then, Tauvin. I’ll talk her out of it later; only let’s  _ go _ , love.”

Buffy followed him out the door at about mach five, amusement chasing her earlier arousal in slow circles as she fingered the coupon between her fingertips. She could feel his blistering arousal pounding through them both to keep hers at a steady, banked place.  _ God _ . “You’re in a hurry,” she observed a little breathily as she stepped into the car.

Spike turned to her, hand on the key and eyes blazing into hers. “I’m all the sudden real interested in puttin’ that collar on and seein’ what it does to you to own me.”

All sorts of things shivered and/or clenched in Buffy’s everything, and she took a brief moment to breathe, reset herself on the seat, well aware that he was drinking in her scent with every inhalation. The air of the cab suddenly felt very close and thick with anticipation. “I thought I already did,” she whispered, and smiled at him invitingly.

“I think I just realized,” he told her quietly, and caught her hand to lift it to her barely-there mark on his neck, “that this, for you, will be like it is for me to taste my mark on your throat, and know that you’re mine.” He bit his lip, lifted her fingers to his mouth, kissed her fingertips. “And, Christ, I want to know what that feels like for you.” He turned away then, to start the car and peel out. But every ounce of his endless heart was in his eyes when he’d said it.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Don't push Buffy. She pushes back.  
And then celebrates. With sex toys. Like ya do.  
  
(Sorry for saving the rest of the proceeds of _that_ till next chapter, but I was already over-budget on words.)  
*VEG*


	34. Chapter 34

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. *EVEG* Nothing ever quite turns out the way you expect it the first time you use new toys... no matter how much you plan. When you don't plan that much at all, sometimes things just happen the way they want to. Especially for rookies. Which, you know, is all a nice, real learning experience. You blush, you move on... and the next time, you know what you're doing a little better, you're a little more confident...  
> Stuff like that.   
> 'Nuff said.
> 
> Which is my way of segueing into, there's some bondage in the beginning of this chapter. *thinks* Some of Spike being a dope in the middle... and then some anal at the end of the chapter. Oh, and shellfish, if anyone's allergic. What else? 
> 
> Oh, there's also a cliffhanger, if anyone's allergic to those. Mostly because I kinda thought by the end of this I should get back to something resembling a plot, since most of this is taken up by enormous amounts of smut, or the lead-in to smut, or thinking about smut. (It's Spuffy, ok? Sometimes they just can't be controlled.)

He was lying all spread out on the bed, with the collar on him. Completely naked, just with the collar on, and nothing else. It stood out against his pale flesh; a dark, livid statement of ownership where he lay facedown on the silky black sheets, his hair loose and already curling up around his ears as if in response to the extremity of the moment. The red filigree highlights of the leather bespoke blood and belonging, the dark shine of the tongue certitude, the gleam of the buckle unbreakable oaths spoken in the dead of night.

His breath seemed to take on a tiny hitch as she surveyed him; probably more for what was going on inside of her than anything to do with his own state. Though, she couldn’t be sure, since he was so gorgeously naked, his body spread-eagled before her like a feast, or an offering.

And, he was bound.

She could barely breathe.

The binding had been his idea. Training wheels, he’d said, for how vulnerable he’d feel later, when they got around to other things. Which wouldn’t be now, because she so wasn’t going to keep her head this time. Not when… /Not when he looks like…  _ that _ . Not when I…/

She bit her lip hard, squeezed her thighs together involuntarily, because he just…

“You alright there, pet?”

“Shut up.”

He did.

Moving slowly, breathing like she’d already run a mile, she climbed aboard the bed. Straddled him, laid her hands on his shoulders. She was sitting on his toned ass, and he was absolutely at her mercy. She could do anything to him. Anything at all, and the thought made her feel both incredibly tender… and set her afire. She wanted to touch him everywhere, and she couldn’t breathe.

Her hips hitched, all on their own, and she was clutching his shoulders, and…

/Oh God, oh fuck…/

They said sex was all in the mind. ‘They’ must have been right, because the knowing and the seeing and the feeling him was all it took, and she came all over him, without any provocation whatsoever; because he was laying there bound helplessly beneath her, all hers and looking gorgeous, and now she was sitting there, clinging to his shoulders and breathing hard, and this was both horribly embarrassing and probably completely unfair, she hadn’t even touched him yet, oh god…

“Oh, bloody fuck, love, oh Christ, Buffy… I had no idea. Oh love, don’t be embarrassed. Oh, pet, that’s sexy as hell, that you love this so much. I swear to you.”

Buffy had her eyes squinched shut, determined never to open them again. “You’re just saying that because you’ll say anything to make me feel better when I’m...” /Oh my God, did that just happen?/

“I don’t lie to you, Buffy.”

He really didn’t. 

And she could breathe again. “I’ll make it up to you.”

A faint smile entered his voice. “Well, now. I’ll look forward to seeing what your devilish mind comes up with, Slayer, since I’m obviously at your mercy.”

Recovering, Buffy slid back a little, onto his—now very damp—thighs. “Pig,” she informed him, breathless, but managing something like light affection once more with his unqualified absolution. And reached down to tickle at his unprotected balls. God, it was going to be amazing to make him grind helplessly against the sheets; to tell him he had to stop. To be in control of his every move…

Just thinking about it could easily make her come again, and she needed to get hold of herself if this was going to be any kind of scene at all. So she controlled her breathing as she slipped her fingers up to lightly brush him, just so, over his taint.

His breath hitched; feeling her struggle, caught on her touch. He turned his face, lowered his forehead to the mattress. “Oh, hell; I’m in for it, aren’t I?”

“I think you might be,” she managed softly.

“I bloody well love you, Buffy.”

Bending over, she kissed the hollow of his lower back. “I know, and I’m glad. Now, I thought I told you to shut up.”

He moaned a little into the slick sheets, and did as he was told.

***

“Look, it isn’t that I don’t want her to be happy. It’s just that it’s a bloody stupid holiday, invented to sell sodding greeting cards, and for nits like those Hallmark bastards to make money hand over bloody fist, and…”

“You’re an idiot, you know that, Blondie?”

Halted with one hand on the ajar crypt door, Buffy stood with eyebrows raised and listened with interest and not a little suspicion to this unexpected conversation between Faith, of all people, and her mate. A, why was her sister-Slayer in there talking alone with her guy in the first place, and B, why was Spike asking Faith, of all people, advice about the hot mess that was Valentine’s Day? /I mean, it’s not like it can get any worse than last year, right?/

They had only just really been getting started on their relationship last Valentine’s Day, and Spike had really kind of blown it. Which, considering how spectacularly he had rocked her socks on her birthday, he had earned enough credit that she had eventually forgiven him, but it had been a pretty major gaffe considering the dope had already previously been in a seriously long-term relationship, and should have known better. By far. /Like, didn’t you, you know, go and fetch Drusilla a fresh corpse, wrap it up in a red ribbon with a few chocolates or something every Valentine’s Day? Isn’t that something a dashing vampire boyfriend would do, if he was all devoted and crap?/ 

He really should have known better than, when confronted with his empty-handedness, to frown at her, tell her that the day was a load of poncy rubbish, pull out a smoke, and lazily ask her if she wanted a shag or not. Asshole. 

Of course, she had since learned that that was simply how her guy acted when he felt backed into a corner, or if he was abruptly confronted with the realization that he had been found inadequate in the romance department, but still. Not very much with the impressive. Buffy had been deeply offended, and had barely spoken to him for a good week and change. 

He'd held out for at least eight days, being just as pissy as she was (not that there hadn’t been plenty of disgruntled sex between them, just no real talking-about-the-problem) before he had finally gotten around to groveling his way back into her good graces. 

Apparently this year he was trying to circumvent the badness early by taking a poll or something, to see how to avoid a similar generally awful nosedive into boyfriendly infamy?

/It’s just… why ask  _ Faith _ , of all people?/ Her relationship experience was, like, nil… and she was about as romantic as a bar hookup. Not that Buffy was hating on her friend, per se, so much as she just didn’t think the girl was the best person to go to for dating advice.

“Well, yeah, I know  _ that _ ,” Spike was saying behind the crypt door. “That’s why I’m asking you what the bloody hell to do about it. Girl’s gonna expect me to go all out. An’ thing is, I’d do it. Have done, any other day… but sod it; I just can’t see my way clear to doin’ it on this one, just because some prat with a storefront tells me to do it on this particular day and not every other, y’know? I’m romantic as hell with the chit, all the bleedin’ time; but all the sudden because I don’t pick this one of all soddin’ days to lay it on extra thick, I’m the world’s biggest knob? It just brasses me off.”

/Okay, Spike, I get it, and you  _ are _ awesomely romantic all the time, but so then why is it so tough to just be romantic on that day too, instead of picking that particular day to be an asshole just to spite the entire greeting-card industry? Because by doing that, you’re hurting me, too. And I thought you didn’t believe in that or something./ Not that she believed in backing him into a corner, but this wasn’t Halloween. She wasn’t asking him to do something, like, against the demon religion, was she?

“Okay, yeah. I get it. You’re a man of principle. Right. And that’s fair. I don’t like people telling me what to do either, or to have some fuckwad with a billion-dollar business tell me how to make a woman happy.” Faith’s tones had landed somewhere between acceptance and amusement.

“Look. I don’t need you fucking mocking me, you nosy bint…”

Faith’s tones dropped to no-nonsense ones. “Look. The fact remains that you’re a goddamn idiot. B hasn’t asked much from you, has she? Like, she’s letting you go out there and do the free-range thing, which, let’s be real, I think is damn generous of her. I’m not sure I could handle it, myself. My instincts might go nuts on you. I’m not sure how she’s not flying apart every second; for real. She gives you a bye every time you fuck up; you two just talk that shit out. I honestly don’t know how the fuck she’s doing this. And you’re pissed off that she wants you to give her a little extra lovin’ and a nice date on one specific day… because some asshole with a calendar decided to make it a thing? Who the fuck  _ cares _ , man? Don’t make it about that dickhead. Make it about your girl, before she tells you to fuck off and leaves your ass!”

Silence from behind the door, then… “Yeah, that’s what Willy said.”

/That’s what… Oh, you so  _ didn’t _ ./

An amazed bark of laughter from Faith put the exclamation point on Buffy’s stunned irritation. “You asked that ratty little shit how to handle Buffy? Hell; don’t ever let her know that, or she will shove her stake so far up your ass you’ll be looking for it next Christmas.”

Faith wasn’t wrong. /You are so dead, Mister./

Spike grunted noncommittally. He sounded maybe a little embarrassed, maybe mildly uncomfortable, and wow. This whole Valentine’s thing was seriously wigging him out, wasn’t it?

/Jeez, why is it such a big damn deal for you, Spike?/

“Well, what did the little twat say to you, anyway?” Faith sounded curious. 

Spike sighed. “He said, and I quote, ‘Jesus, man. The girl’s hot as hell, and she puts up with your ass. Get over yourself. Take her out and give her the time of her life, before she dumps your skinny, pale butt.’”

Buffy closed her eyes and shook her head, fighting the insane urge to laugh over hearing Spike do an fairly accurate impression of Willy the Snitch. She could so very much hear the guy say that, too. 

Faith was laughing enough for the both of them. Buffy could picture her sister-Slayer; bent over, hands on her thighs; heard her slap one soundly in mirth. “Give the man credit,” she got out eventually. “He knows what he’s talking about.”

There was a rustle, a familiar creak as Spike threw himself down on the aging sofa. “Dunno what the hell to do. I feel like whatever I come up with won’t be enough, after last year, and I’ll just brass her off.”

He was met with a dry snort. “Well, don’t ask me. I’m the last one for advice on that quarter. I’d say ask Joyce. She’s bound to have an idea or two. And anyway, I came here to ask  _ you _ advice, not to hand that shit out. So get over your own problems, Blondie, ‘cause I got something you need to help me out with.”

Buffy lifted her eyebrows. Now, this was interesting. 

“Yeah? Trouble in paradise with soldier-boy?”   
Faith sighed loudly enough for it to be audible through Buffy’s spy-crack. “I don’t like this, you know? The dude’s getting too close. He’s finding chinks in my armor, and it’s freakin’ me out. I didn’t ask for a relationship, and I think he thinks that’s what this is.” A short, worried pause. “He’s trying to settle in for the long haul, and I don’t know how to get rid of him. But I have to, because I don’t want to be the one to bail. I like it here right now.”

A short pause, then, “JD?”

The couch squeaked some more, rustled a little. Faith was settling in. “Hell yeah. Thanks.” The bottle swished so loudly that Buffy could hear the liquid sloshing around in it from her post. “What the hell am I gonna do about this guy, anyway?”

“He good in bed?”

A loud scoff. “Why the hell you think I’ve put up with him this long? Shit. Most guys are barely adequate in that department, but he’s no damn slouch. And he’s hardy. Has stamina. He takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’. A girl could get used to that.”

“Well, then…” Spike made it sound like that was enough. 

Buffy rolled her eyes. She knew exactly what her guy was doing; oversimplifying for the other squishy one with the hard shell in the room. /Yeah, right. Make it all about sex and don’t admit it’s more. But she’s stopped lying to herself, Spike, so it’s probably not gonna work. She’s about to run, except…/

/Oh./ She didn’t really want to, or she would have already. And it scared the shit out of her. So she was coming to Spike to talk it through, because she had sensed in him a kindred spirit.

The silence dragged on inside the crypt for a while, mostly punctuated with swishing bottle noises, then finally, “Fuck, though. The thing is, that’s not enough. I mean, that worked before the guy got all up in my grill and started being all… attentive, and trying to do shit like take me to dinner and… treat me and shit…”

“Hanging’s too good for the sonofabitch,” Spike agreed wryly.

“Look, if you’re not gonna be on my side, fuck off.”

Spike sighed. “Just tell him he’s scaring you, and to back off.”

/Eeee. Blunt much?/

Predictably, Faith went off. “Oh, fuck you! I’m not scared of that shitty little soldier. Who the fuck are you calling scared, you skinny-ass vamp? I could deck you right here!”

Buffy blinked, and then realization struck. /Ooooh, I see what you did there, Spike! Sneaky vampire. Got her right in the pride./

“I’m just saying,” Spike went on blandly, and she could picture him, leaning lazily back, all spread out on the couch and looking up at the agitated Slayer in his ‘living room’ without the slightest concern. “If he’s too much for you to handle, let the bloke off easy. Tell him straight off you can’t take the heat and let him off the hook now…”

There was a sudden rustling, and the sound of a mostly-empty bottle falling to concrete to explode all over the place. “I will  _ fuck _ you up. I don’t care if you’re B’s or not…”

“Sure it’s me you’re brassed at?”

A short, pregnant silence, then… “Dammit. How the fuck did  _ you _ do it?”

Buffy could almost hear the shrug, then, “You weigh it. Decide if it’s worth it, to stop holding back the parts that keep you safe. You weigh the risk of getting broken again against the gain. You know you’ll probably still get kicked in the danglies a few more times… but that’s just bleedin’ life, an’ if you’re not riskin’ it, you’re not livin’. Tell you that from my century-plus. So you open up, just that one more time; not hopin’ you don’t get destroyed again, but knowin’ you probably will. And you accept it, because what happens along the way?” A short, exalted pause. “It’s so bloody worth it.”

Faith didn’t answer. In fact, she remained so still that Buffy wondered if she’d stopped breathing. Then, “The last time I did that was when I lived here before. And I ended up with a knife in my gut.”

Closing her eyes, Buffy sagged, until her forehead met her closed fist on the door. /Oh. Oh God…/

Spike waited a beat, then answered, low and certain, “You’re still here. Back again.” A brief halt, a quiet query. “Is it worth it?”

“Fuck. Goddammit, you bastard.”

“Just sayin’.”

Hard, jarring footsteps, coming right for her. Buffy whirled, swinging for the foliage that covered the far-left side of the crypt, hid herself behind the one big hank of ivy there. Faith exited to stride off, turned on her heel and peeled out to the right; out through the cemetery, toward the gate, every line of her broadcasting frustration, rage, an old and lingering pain. 

Closing her eyes against about ten thousand conflicting emotions, Buffy slipped away; away from Restfield, away from all of it. 

She needed to think.

***

Given the conversation she had overheard, she wasn’t sure if she should expect much of anything again this year for V-day. She watched Willow and Tara prance off early from Tara’s tarot-reading shift at the Magic Box to go do date-y things (first dancing at the Bronze, which was reopening under new management, then a smirky ‘no-comment’). Then Xander passed a cool twenty to Jonathan to take over the store so he could whisk Anya away for dinner somewhere demon-y and somewhere between high-class and affordable. After a short and pointless training sesh with Giles, Buffy sighed and headed back toward the house, because she probably should go grab that one textbook she’d left there before running back up to the dorm for the night. She’d have it to herself, probably, since Wil would be at Tara’s room, and who knew where Spike was planning on…

She felt the fizzy vamp-buzz just before chilly hands fell over her eyes. “Don’t move, Slayer,” he growled, low and threatening.

/Okay, I was distracted! Talk about being lost in your thoughts!/ “Uh, do I say ‘uncle, or…” This was some weirdness.

“Just wait here. Keep your eyes closed.”

Surprise and confusion gave way to the faintest beginnings of excitement. /Did you actually…  _ do _ something?/ “So, I’ll just wait here, then?”

She jumped when she felt something soft and alien brush her face. “Wh…”

“Just binding your eyes, pet. So we don’t ruin the surprise.”

/A blindfold? Really?/ “Whose idea  _ was _ this?”

“Couldn’t get much help, in the end.” The soft, dark cloth was slid down over her forehead, to cover both her eyes and the bridge of her nose, then tugged around behind her head. “Mum told me she was too busy goin’ on her own date with that tosser Brian to give advice, save I should get over meself and stop bein’ an even bigger tosser…” The cloth was knotted firmly behind her skull.

“A, that’s good advice, and B, we haven’t even  _ met _ Brian yet, so how do you know he is one?”

“Hush.” Cool hands turned her around three times, as if she were a small child playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey. Ooookay, weirdo. “Vengeance told me she didn’t have a lot of ideas because she was too busy thinking of her own upcoming romantic adventures, but I’d better make it good this time or she’d hire out…” He gave her a little nudge to start her walking.

Buffy kept her footing because she was a Slayer, dammit, and had supernatural reflexes. “Gotta love that women’s solidarity,” she answered, softly curious as she stepped out, hesitant as hell without vision to guide her. Her senses were on high alert, listening for approaching pedestrians, or nearby obstacles, or...

His hand dropped to take hers up, cool and dry and reassuring; pulled it into his, tucked it into the crook of his arm. “The witches told me to man up and stop being a prat, that I’d had over a hundred bloody years to figure this sort of thing and I ought to be better at this than I had been.”

Nestling in close, Buffy sighed. “Can’t argue that. I mean, you’ll do all this insane prep for my birthday, but Valentine’s Day is ‘nancy’…”

“Shouldn’t ought to talk me out of it, love, before I really get up any momentum.”

“Sorry. Go on.” 

“So I had to improvise…”

“Hence a blindfold?”

“It seemed a fine place to start.”

“Well… it’s creative. I’m not complaining. Yet, anyway.” She leaned her head onto his shoulder and kept pace with him, no longer all that concerned that she was going to walk into a wall. “I’m not going to end up slamming face-first into a pool of entrails or anything, though, right? Because I can imagine a lot of things that might seem romantic to a Slayer, and while I do tend to like a good fight…”

“Oh, I’ve a date planned that will appeal both sides of you, my love, but there won’t be entrails, no.”

“Okay, then.” Buffy pulled in a long, slow breath of the evening air, cool and spring-like, and smiled, love filling her like light and heat and wonder. “It’s a really nice night.”

“I soddin’ love you, Buffy.”

“You really must, to be doing this.”

A faint, pained note touched his voice, washed away like it was never there. “You’ve no bloody idea.”

***

The spread in the crypt was really kind of amazing, considering what he’d had to work with. He’d thrown some kind of really beautiful, soft, cashmere-feeling throw over the old sofa to make it all yummy. No clue where he’d found something like that, but it was like cuddling up on a red and black cloud. He’d dug up a chenille pillow, even, which was situated under her head while he finished cleaning up the little picnic he’d set up on the floor; now mercifully cleaned of broken glass and covered with a spare oriental rug from whatever source had given them the ones downstairs. 

Lifting aside his little stack of mismatched plates and cutlery, he set them over on top of the fridge, to be washed off later, and she wasn’t going to ask him where he’d gotten the lobster for her. He’d eaten only a few bits of it, had largely focused on feeding her… and plying her with wine, with the excuse that it ‘paired well with the beast’. Which it had, by the way. Seriously well. 

She was starting to really understand the wine thing. As in it was definitely not about quantity, but about quality. She had had maybe a third of a glass, total, if that, felt at most slightly warm in the belly region, but she had certainly enjoyed her meal far more by reason of its inclusion than she would have otherwise. Not that she would have turned up her nose at a friendly crustacean feast, wine or no wine.

“Alright, love.” 

Smiling, she swung her feet back to the ground and sat up. “Well, that was nice. Now what?”

He lifted his brows pointedly. “Now we go downstairs.”

“What, and you have your wicked way with me?”

His expression turned challenging, and he clicked his tongue behind his teeth, smiled that one smile of his that was all sexual calculation. But… there was something behind it, at the back of his eyes… “Was thinkin’ maybe you might have your wicked way with me, pet.”

A solid shiver of anticipation worked its way down her spine, settled firmly between her legs, and set up camp. She forgot how to breathe for a solid half-minute before she could conjure up enough spare oxygen to answer. “Ah… Well, that’s… Hm.”

The thing at the back of his gaze moved to settle at the front, filtering in to just behind the armored look. “A nice gift, I thought? Maybe for both of us. Which might even make me rethink the holiday in future, I reckon.” And his eyes glittered on her in challenge. At the surface, anyway.

Underneath, she saw all him. Naked and waiting for her answer. 

It was very possible that she might just forget how to breathe for the foreseeable future. But then some instinct kicked in, and she was in motion, had moved closer to him, laid her hands on his chest. “Do you want this?”

The glittery armor dropped away. The challenge and the teasing vanished as his eyes warmed on hers; open, bright as stars, and filled with some sort of friable but excited energy. “Yeah,” he answered, and his voice was steady as he said it.

/Oh. God./ 

Somehow she found the wherewithal to take his hand, turn, lead him to the gap in the floor that was the entrance to their bedroom. He followed without a word. 

Once below, she turned to him again, reached up, cupped his cheek. “How do you want this?” she asked him, softly.

“Together,” he told her without hesitation. “Loving. But with you in charge, so I don’t have to think.”

He was bared before her already. Putting it all out there. 

Buffy pulled in a deep, hard breath, used it to steady herself. Did a quick internal diagnostic. Had she had too much wine for this? /No, I’m steady. Not whirling. It was only a little./ Breath in, out. /I’ve got him. I’m all the way here./ 

Drawing her fingers down from his cheek, she laid them on his chest, just over where his heart lay, silent and hers, cupped him there. “I want you to undress,” she told him softly, “and stand here for me, so I can touch you all over, and make you know I’m here with you.” /I need to be what he needs for this./ Accordingly, she shoved down any niggling doubts that she could be enough. He was trusting her, which meant that she was, and would be, all that and more. No question./

Nodding, he dropped his hands to the hem of his shirt, eyes never leaving hers, then tugged it over his head. And reached out briefly, as he tossed it away, to cup her cheek in turn. “We’re both here, Buffy. And I know  _ you’re _ here.”

She nodded back, closed her eyes briefly… and reopened them, sure on his. Resolved, now, to keep them on him from now till they were done, and him safe. Set her palms, open and warm, on his chest. “Go on.”

He smiled as he undid his belt, dropped his jeans. His boots had come off earlier, upstairs, during their impromptu—and decadent—little picnic, leaving him barefoot and vulnerable now. His eyes never left hers as he resolved before her into her naked, smaller-seeming Spike; the figure beneath the coat and the armor, the man who was both ferocious beast when he needed to be… and also the remains of a poet named William, and a still-young demon who loved unwisely and with all he had. “Come here,” she told him, and caught his hands to tug him to the bed, clad only in a few bits of silver and his few shreds of dignity, laid him down on the bed. He went as he was directed, scooting back from seated to reclining on his side, watching her as she undressed with slow economy to join him, moved to lay with him. Pressed her hands to him again, to lay all along his body. “Alright,” she told him softly, “close your eyes, and just let me touch you all over for a while, without talking. Without thinking. Just be in your body, Spike.”

He promptly obeyed, and let her have free rein of him, while she ran her fingers over every part of him that she could reach. A light caress to the secret hollows of his beautiful form, eliciting shivers as she brushed just her fingertips here, there; along the fold under his arm, the sensitive flesh of his inguinal curve, making him shudder. The thin flesh of the inside of wrist and arm and elbow, the wildly responsive areas of his neck, with their demon’s nerves, making him quake. Behind his ears, around behind his balls, lightly pressing till he shifted a little and made a sound that wasn’t quite a whimper, his cock bouncing slightly in protest, then down along the soft skin of his inner, upper thighs. They had done a fair amount of touching before this, of course… but somehow, it hadn’t been quite like this; just touching for touching’s sake, without a specific goal in mind. No race to orgasm in the back of either mind, but just this. Just the sensual pleasure and enjoyment of exploration. /Kind of a shame, that we haven’t done this yet./ “Turn around.”

He didn’t hesitate.

At his back, she ran her fingers slowly over his ribs,  _ bump bump bump _ , up over the wings of his shoulder-blades. Fingered their edges, brushed that one little scar there, on the right one, and not for the first time wondered how he had gotten it. Probably during his human life, since it existed at all. Trailed one forefinger down his spine, then, wordlessly counting vertebrae while he lowered his head to the silky pillow and made a sound like what she was doing was torturous. Brushed the backs of her nails along his sides, where his arms had shifted forward, turned her hands over to run her fingertips over his waist, then down along his hips. Dug satisfyingly in on his butt, because, /This is mine. Love this butt, here./ Felt him shift again, come a little closer to her as she continued, running the backs of her nails again, up and down the backs of his thighs, inward a little, then around… and she had his cock in her hand and was pumping him slowly while she kissed him very lightly on the back of his neck, right on his nape; almost more a settling of the lips there than a kiss.

He whimpered again, hips stuttering into movement, finding her rhythm. “Tell me you want me, Spike,” she reminded him softly. They could always stop. 

But she could feel the hunger in him. The desperate need. To have it again… and to get past it. To have it over with, and be done worrying. To not feel broken. “I do,” he answered, his tones a little ragged. “But, Buffy…” He hesitated, and she felt a little pang run through him.

“Anything you need.” This was going to be a lot, for him. She knew how much it could be when it had been never, much less… Oh, she wasn’t even going to  _ try _ to imagine. “Anything.”

“Keep yourself pressed against me, till I say I’m right. So I know it’s you.”

/Oh./ “Of course.”

Granted, she was going to have to break that promise briefly, lean away to grab the…

His hand slipped back, over his body, brushed her arm. Opened, and oh. He was holding a little tube of lube; one of the samplers Tauvin had shoved into their shopping bag back in the sex shop, and when had he grabbed that? Had he, like, had it in his jeans pocket all night or something? 

She didn’t comment, though, just took it from him, cracked it open. Warmed it in her hands for a second, because that would be nice for him. He was always raving about how good her warm body felt for him, wasn’t he? 

Once her fingers were coated, she scrunched down, wormed her left hand under his waist, got around with that slicked hand to pick up her rhythm again. It was a little awkward at that angle, but he didn’t seem to mind all that much that all she could really do, honestly, was play with about one-third of his cock.

His attention was mostly focused elsewhere as she kissed him again, there on the middle of his back, and drew her knees up so that they touched the backs of his thighs. Spent a moment lightly caressing him once more just there, behind his balls; not hard enough to bring him off, or even really to tease, but just so that he’d know where she was. “Talk to me.” She could feel him, but it just seemed like a good idea to get him involved; get him out of his own head. 

“Oh, Christ, pet…” He shook his head a little against the pillow, and she could feel his faint prickles of uncertainty, barely there under a flood of need. And she knew he’d bitten his lip. “Do want you. Want you so bloody bad. You can feel it. Dunno if I want you to do it fast and have it over, or take me slow and easy and make me feel like it’s the first soddin’ time…”

She wondered if the first time had been good for him. It was a real dice roll to ask, considering, so she skipped it. “I’m leaning toward slow. Mostly because I’m the rookie, here.” She tried for light and humorous, to break the mood a little, heard his faint huff of surprised amusement. 

“Well, s’pose that’s two votes, then, for that way.” His hand fell to join her over his cock, his fingers locking over hers. “Go on, then.”

/Moment of truth./ “I love you,” she reminded him softly, and  _ felt _ it at him, as she moved her fingers upward a little, tickled at the spot she hadn’t touched again since their first time together. 

His head jerked back on the pillow, so abruptly that she almost yanked her hand away… except that then he groaned low between his teeth and started pulling at his cock, hard and earnest, and she felt the pulsing starting for him, radiating out from where she was touching, out toward his cock to join with what he was doing there, what she had been doing there and all over him, and, /Oh./ 

Before she was quite sure what she was doing, or how it was happening, she had pressed only this tiny little bit, and he huffed out a breath on another little moan, and then it was like it was so easy; and then he was pushing his cock back hard against himself, his hand clamped just beneath hers, and he breathed out in a long, steadying exhale as her finger slipped in with almost no problem at all. 

And then he was incredibly still; not quite tensing, but very, very immobile in the way only vampires could go, and really tight around her for a second; and she found herself breathing kind of heavily. Maybe more heavily than he was as she lowered her forehead to his back. “You okay?” she asked, and hoped like hell he was… and that it wasn’t pushing too much or implying he wasn’t to ask. But in that instant, she could feel nothing from him. It was almost like he didn’t know himself, until…

At her words, he unfroze. “Oh, hell yes,” he breathed, and seemed to uncoil, somehow. And then he eased around her finger, and he wasn’t moving at all, but he wasn’t motionless anymore; not in the same way. He was… animated, and all of a sudden she could feel him again, while the rushing sensations came back like a radio tuning in to vibrations like thunder between them… and then to slowly ebb to some sort of station-keeping; a long, washing hum of… recognition. 

He pulled in a deep, calming sort of breath, gave a little nod, then, “Can I have another, love?” He sounded almost normal-voiced, there. 

He was going to be okay. He was… insisting on it. And she better not ask if he was sure. So she kissed him again, rubbed her cheek to his back, pulled out enough. “You can have anything you want,” she told him, and slid a second finger in.

This time he didn’t freeze, nor did he clench anything. He exhaled; a long, slow, shuddering breath, and then said, his voice tight, “Buffy, this is the part where I need you to be the side of you that likes to give as good as you get. I’m going to need to feel this, and know it’s good. So I want you… need you to use me hard until I can’t bloody well breathe anymore, and then once you’ve got me well broken in, we’ll fetch that ridiculous toy you picked out and you’ll send me right off to where I’ll forget any damn thing at all but what you’re doin’ to me.”

Sucking in a fortifying breath, Buffy nodded, more to herself than to him. She had done a little research, was the thing. In the interest of being prepared, for whenever they did get around to this. She had after all felt somewhat armed for the occasion, after her own personal indoctrination. 

Tugging her left arm out from under him, she braced herself a little better. “You’ll have to handle the… handling,” she informed him, and didn’t even blush as she said it.

“Professional wanker, here,” he told her with a faint tinge of amusement in his voice. “Bit out of practice, but…”

“Liar,” she answered, and shifting around a tad, pushed herself up on her elbow for a little leverage. Trailed her fingers up and down his spine again, for just a second… and hooked her fingers. “I think… the book said… like this.” And she tried an experimental thrust.

His reaction could have been good or bad. “Oh, Christ, pet…” He promptly rolled up onto his knees, almost leaving her behind. “Oh, fuck, what the hell did you  _ read?” _

She would have frozen in worry, except she had felt the pleasure rolling through him, from that spot she had touched all the way to the end of his cock and radiating outward as if to seek for his entire body. It felt the same as what she had done to him before from the outside, but way more intense. So she followed him up, and pressed lightly at the spot again; brush and in and brush and out. “I studied up.”

“Oh fuck, Slayer, I  _ love _ you!” It was like he was already starting to come… but just paused there, while the same sensation rolled through him in waves every time she touched him, to spread throughout his entire body. And now he was rocking back against her, and it seemed like he had practically forgotten about his own hand for a few; and man, was she glad she had done her research! 

After a minute or so… “Do you want the toy yet, or is this…”

“Yeah,” he answered, clipped and needy sounding, and oh, wow, she was liking where this was heading, because he sounded breathless and strained, and she could really get used to him sounding like that.

“Where…”

Still rocking a little, he fumbled under the pillow next to his hand and literally flung the thing at her. He had apparently already unwrapped, cleaned, and prepped their little purple buddy, because it landed next to her knee, neatly mummified in a hand-towel. She paused to pick it up, and he took that moment to stroke himself, murmuring something under his breath that sounded sharp and gruff. “What are you saying over there?” she asked, and pondered how to slick the thing up one-handed. /Heck, I’m going to need to switch anyway. “Sorry,” she put in, and tugged her fingers out.

“Fuck. I said, you’re deceptive and dangerous and I clearly left you to think about this for too damn long.”

Buffy smiled archly as she located the tiny lube-bottle, briefly lost amongst the rumpled bedclothes. She slicked down the cheerful purple dildo and returned to her station behind him. “Are you complaining?”

“Bloody hell no!”

Pausing at the moment of truth, she cupped his butt and caressed him lightly with her thumb. “You know we can just…” she began, just in case.

His tones turned hard, ratcheted tighter. “I haven’t said my word and I’m not planning on it. Christ, Buffy, I bloody well need this.”

“Okay.” Keeping her free hand on his left thigh to remind him she was there, she tapped the toy lightly against him, like a little, ‘knock-knock, anybody home?’. He groaned and shivered a little, and rocked back against her some more. She watched his arm going fast, elbow flashing, heard his bracelet jangling fiercely as he readied himself for the intrusion. “Alright,” she whispered, and pressed.

“Oh fuck…” he whispered; as well he might, since it was the hell of a lot broader than a couple of her fingers. But he didn’t hesitate or lock up on her, which was, she supposed, the benefit of a century-plus of practice. He just let out a low noise that she couldn’t quite identify, much less classify in the groan or moan category, ended on a grunt once the thing was in, and sagged. “Bloody hell.”

She didn’t ask if he was alright. She knew better than to insult him like that. He would use his word or tell her. If he wasn’t saying anything, then… 

She just gave him a moment. 

After said moment had passed, his head came up, and he said softly, “Let me feel it, Buffy.”

/Alright./ She went slow. Pressed it in; two inches. Three, four, five, when he didn’t protest. When it was all the way in, she was goggling. The thing was at least eight inches. He was insane.

Except then he just sagged again, groaning a little. “Fuck, that’s nice,” he whispered.

“You’re crazy, you know that?”

To her surprise, he chuckled. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, pet.” Man, he sounded husky. 

He wasn’t lying, though. He had a rushing, tingling thing going on over his body now, and… “Should you wanna give me a good drubbing with that now, pet, I wouldn’t mind it. I’ll probably end up inside out and upside down before the end, and probably forget how to speak save in syllables fit only for the village idiot, but I’d like to think I’d’ve well earned it.”

Sometimes he spoke another language entirely, but she thought she got the drift. And, he was nuts. But she couldn’t blame him for wanting to get back to the whole prostate thing, so she bit her lip and withdrew the toy. He moaned full-throated when it struck him on the way out, again on the way back in, and she  _ felt _ that, holy cow. And then again, and again, and she was doing it faster, because it was building for him, and he was rocking again, and he was back to holding his cock, but only to press it backward to increase the pressure, and she thought maybe to hold himself back while she drove him crazy, and it went on so long she thought she was going to lose her mind too while the waves cascaded over him like some vast, sourceless, pressurized sea of crashing, beating, pounding swell that would never… ever… 

Break.

Till it did, and he was making a keening sound like he was drowning while he came, except he was coming in a completely different way than she had ever seen him; a lot less, and shaking all over, and then he collapsed on his face, and just, wow.

They weren’t kidding when they called it the male g-spot. /Except in reverse, because when he does that to me, it makes me come a lot more, not less, quantity-wise./ But she could at least feel proud that she seemed to have successfully not traumatized him more.

She gave him about five minutes to lay there and bask before she tugged the toy out and laid it back on its little terrycloth nest, then draped herself over him and smiled into his neck. “Hey. Earth to Spike. You still in there?”

“Unf.”

“I love it when you’re all eloquent. My sexy English-major guy.”

“Humanities,” he mumbled, sounding like he had marbles stuffed in his cheeks. “And Greek. Latin. Not English.”

“Liar. Humanities is, like, English plus tax, with, what? Classical music and painters and stuff rolled into it, isn’t it? And philosophy and crap?”

“Mmm.”

“Kind of cheating to smoosh about seven majors into one, isn’t it?”

“Was in school for a long bloody time.” He turned his head on the pillow, eyes shut tight so that his lashes fanned out over his cheeks like contented shadows. “Didn’t learn as fast as you do.”

“Oh, shut up.” Sliding up over his cute, naked butt, she planted her hands just under his arms so that her fingers spread out beneath his shoulders and pecs, and leaned over to plant a kiss on his nose. “You ever moving again?”

“No. How the hell did you learn how to do any of that, Buffy?”

She settled back onto his cool body. “I told you. I did some studying.”

“Incredible woman.”

She turned her cheek against his shoulder blade, trailed a finger up over his arm. “I wanted to do it right.”

“Bloody hell.”

She hesitated… but she really needed to know. “And you’re… okay?”

His one nearer eye cracked open, a barely-visible sliver over the curved swale of his neck. “Buffy, I’m shagged right out of my soddin’ gourd. Can’t even feel my bleedin’ feet. Yeah. I’m well beyond ‘okay’, love, no worries.” He exhaled again; a gusty noise, and the eye fell shut once more. “I’ll hold you and kiss you and thank you properly, maybe even get up the energy to roll over and make some pretense at gettin’ you off too, so you won’t think I’m a completely worthless sod, once I can move at all.”

/I’ll take it./ She was definitely turned on, now that she had time to notice her own body as anything but a sort of antenna for the backwash of all his sensations. But… yeah; she had definitely enjoyed doing that to him, which once upon a time would probably have seriously embarrassed her, but she was way over that kind of thing by now. 

Far from embarrassed, she was actually feeling more than a little proud, on top of the horny, and grinned to herself as she nuzzled at his back. “I’ll give you a few minutes. And I don’t expect you to be in Corvette mode, it’s okay…”

He blinked the eye back open at that, to eye her muzzily. “Corvette…”

“Tight, fast, high-performance coupe?”

He groaned. “Oh, bloody hell. Just for that I should…”

She felt the sudden rushing tingle of another vampire just before he did, and half-pivoted, ready for war, while he froze in what she belatedly realized was, dammit, recognition. 

Because of course by then it was too late. 

“Bad dog cut his leash away, gave it to another. Mummy misses you, came to see you, couldn’t feel you. Why did you do it, Spike, and make Mummy bleed?” She sashayed in, in her ghostly white gown with her mazy speech that made less than zero sense to anyone but herself, and maybe the vampire who had had to parse her ramblings for a hundred years, and was now tensing in recognition of all it meant. “Saint Valentine, so sweet, in prison, tortured so beautifully, martyred so nicely; bleeding everywhere so that all the hearts can go thump thump thump. Never remember why they pass their pretty bits of paper over his entrails…” Closer, closer, drawing near to them in the dim candlelight of their nest, drawing two fingers lazily over long swan’s neck and the vee of her pale nightdress, the wayward curl of stark, dark hair. “Can you come and make me bleed again, bad dog?”

Buffy froze over her mate’s naked body, pinning him to the bed, to protect him from the mad sire who had finally come to call.

* * *   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
dun dun duuuuunnnnn...  
Welcome to my version of "Crush". With bonus established relationship, and completely different reasons to break out the chains.   
*innocent look*  
Also, don't ask me why this and the other big WIP, Souls Unbound, are mirroring each other right now. It was very much not a planned thing, so if you're reading both... my bad?  



	35. Chapter 35

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More Dru for your pleasure, as we do a side-trip into AtS for a few. 
> 
> wolf-shadoe is amazing, fixing up this stuff for us, btw, as I tried to coordinate two shows worth of stuff (since I never watched these two concurrently, and so my mental capacity to see them as things that happened on the same timeline is nil). 
> 
> And, you all are amazing, and I know I owe you so much love. Holiday break from school has cut my child-free time to zilch, but I really do intend to hit you all back as soon as I possibly can. Thank you all so much!

“Buffy, get off me. Let me handle this.”

She crouched over him, fiercely protective. “No.” He was  _ hers _ now.

“You don’t need to protect me from her…”

_ “No.” _

“Bad dog gave his lead to the Slayer. What a silly, naughty boy…”

Somehow, he twisted around beneath her, grabbed her by the shoulders, caught her eyes away from the glowing apparition standing over their bed in the dark. “I’ve managed Dru for over a century, love. I can talk her down now.”

Buffy couldn’t seem to clear her head, couldn’t quite keep her eyes on her mate. All she could see was the being who had come to try to reclaim him, take him away. Her brain felt fuzzy, and there was a roaring somewhere in the back of her skull. “You’re  _ mine _ .”   
  
They were the only words that really made any sense at all, even if the shapes of words felt odd on her tongue.

“Oh, Christ.” Prying her hands off of his shoulders with serious effort, Spike held them in his hands. “I  _ am _ yours, pet. But I need to let her know it, alright? In a way that makes sense to her, so she doesn’t keep coming back over and over again tryin’ to off you nights, yeah?”

Buffy shook her head. The sense of the words weren’t penetrating, and she couldn’t make her body move, her hands open where they clung to his. 

“Bloody fuck.” Sliding out from beneath her, Spike kissed both of her hands, then all but tore himself free to face his sire, eyes hard and bright in the gloom. “Hullo, Dru.”

“You know Grandmum is back. My baby, now. We have had so much fun in the city of the Angels, my sweet. We’ve had a merry chase with Angelus.” One pale, long-fingered hand reached out to graze his cheek. “You should come. Come home, my William. I want us to be a family again.”

Buffy remained still on the bed, trembling and frozen and torn in half as they spoke. She could hear the yearning in the older vampire’s voice, the pain at the loss of her firstborn childe… and she knew how those things would affect Spike even if he could no longer feel his sire. It made her quake, stretched thin between poles. One side of her wanted to fly at Drusilla, tear her to pieces for daring to come here, lay hands on her mate… and one side of her, the side that could still sort of think, was aware that doing so would hurt Spike; hurt him badly. But if she moved at all she would do the first thing, so the only thing she could do was to stay incredibly still, and not move at all.

“Dru, I love you, but that’s not my life anymore. Whatever the hell kind of spell those lawyer-boys used to mojo the old bent bitch back from the great beyond, and whatever you two have been doing to play Peaches, get him back into the game, it’s not my lookout. You have a new companion. It’s a bit twisted even for our family, you vamping Darla, but she’s bound to  _ you _ now. You don’t need me anymore…”

Dru seemed not to be listening to him at all. Staring, half-dancing to music only she heard, she dragged a nail over the upper slope of one breast, hard, till dark, used blood welled up. Gathered the seeping fluid on her fingertip, she held the offering out to Spike. “You were always my knight, my sweet. Be mine again?”

Buffy quaked from head to toe, everything in her trying to fly at the other woman; to tear her head right off for daring to come in here and try to put her blood into Spike. To take him away from their claim; how  _ dare _ she?

But she could hear the staunch loyalty in Spike’s voice as he drew himself up, along with the tatters of his dignity. He always had more of that naked than some people carried while fully clothed. “You threw me away, Dru. You sent me to Buffy. I’m hers, now.”

Drusilla’s pale hand lowered slowly, and she looked bewildered. “What a terribly awful doggie, to cast off your lead, hand it to Sunshine, turn away from your family…”

A faint, withering note entered Spike’s tones, but mostly he just sounded tired. “Oh, because it was such a bloody lovely one. Leave off, Dru. We had our time. It’s over, now.” Buffy could hear the dismissive note in Spike’s voice as she rocked on the damp sheets. It was all that held her still, stayed her hand. “You go on back, yeah? Have your fun twistin’ up your asshat of a sire. Good luck turnin’ him into his bad old self again, with that broody soul of his intact. Sounds a right riot of fun…”

“Like lollipops at the circus. Although...” Out of the corner of her eye, Buffy saw the pale vampire lift her bloodied hand to her cheek, and noticed for the first time that one side of her face was scarred with old blisters, and bright with the remainders of flame. She made a petulant, pained mewl of a noise. “I didn't care for Angelus setting us on fire…”

Spike stilled briefly, regret gleaming in his eyes, showing in his stance. “See that. Sorry about it, pet. But no doubt you’ll heal in time" He exhaled slowly. "You're playin’ a dangerous bloody game.”

Dru circled closer around Buffy’s chosen, stalking ever nearer. “If I had my knight with me, we would be strong enough to fight him. We would surround him easily, you, me, Grandmum; like wolves round a mammoth in the tar, sinking, sinking.” She sounded dreamy. “Prod him with spears. Then Mummy's new baby could nudge that silly spark right out of him, and the Whirlwind would take the city by storm. No more Angels…”

Spike grunted a laugh. “I haven’t been your knight for a long bloody time, Dru, and the Whirlwind died the day the old poofter got that shiny soul of his. Don’t think Darla could knock the bloody thing loose no matter how hard she tried. She didn’t the last time she got his prick wet. Not sure why she thinks doin’ it again’ll do the trick, now.” He gave a little shrug. “Any road, luv, I’m Buffy’s now, not yours, and I’ll never be again, so you may as well just toddle off. You gave me away…”

“I was wrong.” Drusilla leaned in close, whispered in his ear. “Come back with me.” And she rubbed her bloodied finger on his lips.

Buffy came exceedingly close to losing the tether on her inner feral-ness. Her vision briefly fuzzed out. All sound muted to something roaring.

It all came back the moment Spike spat, hard. His voice tuned in again, flat and uncompromising, his denial plain. “No. My blood belongs to the Slayer now. Good job, too.” His stance remained immovable. “Sorry, pet.”

Something cracked in Drusilla’s features. She whirled on Buffy where she knelt on the bed, shaking. “Nasty Slayer! Cut my bad dog loose and gave him a new collar! Doesn’t fit! Wrong color! Turned him into a thing that tries to walk in sunlight! Cruel mistress is the sun…” 

Buffy closed her eyes as the tearing feeling became an internal earthquake. Everything in her that was instinctive wanted to leap at Drusilla, pin her to the wall, hiss in her face, stake her; anything to keep her away from her property. And then there was that thin sliver remaining of her thinking brain that said… ‘Don’t. She’s a part of him. You’d hurt him  _ so _ bad if you… And owning him in this way doesn’t mean you get to… It doesn’t mean that you actually  _ own _ him. He gets to stand up for himself and make decisions for himself and…’

And it was far more difficult than she could ever express to believe that, when everything in her lizard brain was shrieking at her to unceremoniously dust his sire and then fling Spike to the floor and impale herself on him; ravage him with her bared teeth till she drew blood and he screamed her name, so that she knew for sure that he knew where he belonged; and what the  _ hell _ was wrong with her, was this a demon thing? Because it was disgusting and insane.

“…Soon he’ll be dust for you; all dust and cinders for you. Always ends under the sun, you’ve destroyed him…”

Caught broadside in mid-feral roaring, Buffy moaned, abruptly terrified that Drusilla had seen something that indicated that her holding Spike’s bond meant she was bad for him, that…

“Oh, shut it, Dru, not this bollocks again!” Spike’s voice was tense now, probably because he could feel the struggle going on inside of her. “I’m not gonna dust for loving Buffy. And even if I did, I’d do it and proud. Now, go on, before something bad happens, because right now you have no idea how close you are to dustin’, yourself. The Slayer’s on the ragged edge, is only holdin’ back for my sake, so you’d better head on back before she loses her hold. ‘Sides. I’ve done the whole LA scene, an’ it didn’t agree with me. I’m chuffed with what I have goin’ here in Sunny-D.” He gestured around him. “Decent digs, tasty townies, good relations with the boss…”

“Oh, my Spike. Always so ready to be led by your heart… It will destroy you, your wanting her…”

Spike’s voice hardened, his jaw tightening. “Bein’ the Master’s a bit of work, but I make do…”

Dru lifted her finger, wagged it in a scolding gesture. “Curbing yourself to do her will… Tsk, tsk. You are not a politician, my sweet. You're a killer. Born to slash... and bash... and...” Dancing slowly around him again, she lifted her arms, jerked her hips, and gave a little gasp of pleasure at every word. “Oh! Bleed like beautiful poetry.” She was breathing faster now, clearly excited by the imagery. 

Buffy closed her eyes, fighting hard this time against the faint thread of excitement growing inside her mate. Drusilla definitely knew how to play to his instincts, and god knew they were still there. Not that she had ever denied they were, and obviously he had a hundred and twenty years of such mayhem under his belt, with this person at his side. She knew that he tamped them down every day to be with her. The associations were stronger than anything he had ever known; and they were every one of them wrapped up in with this vampire sashaying around before him, attempting with all she had to seduce him back to the dark side. 

/And, this is his fight. If I jump up and throw her away from him, I’ll be taking that struggle from him. And he will never know what he would have chosen./

It was taking everything Buffy had to remain still. To let him fight his own battle. 

Ninety-eight percent of her did not question what her mate would do. They had the bond. He couldn’t leave her. 

But two percent of her knew that he might weaken, run wild with his sire. Might break; at least for a while, and fall to all that he held under wraps every day for her. And if he did, what would they do about it, after? When he came crawling back to her?   
  
How would they come back from that?

Dru was tangoing around Spike; spinning, brushing him with her hands while he panted, naked and strained. He twisted, watching her with glittering eyes as she waltzed around him, lifting her arms and casting her sensual spell… then laid a hand on his chest, spun to lean back against him and laugh madly, looking backward and up, into his eyes. “No Slayer could ever stop you from flowing. Not my Spike. This thing she has put inside you? It lies. It tells you you are not a bad dog…” She whirled again, brushed her lips to his. “But you  _ are _ .” 

Buffy held her breath, forced herself to watch. And saw the moment when something broke in Spike.

He moved, faster than she had ever seen him, arms flashing and in game face… but it was to reach up, detach his sire’s arms from his neck. And Buffy could breathe again at the frozen thing inside of him as he held Dru’s hands for a moment, cool in his own. The same temperature as he was; comfortable, known… and moving away. And walked her backward, kissing each hand, on the backs, a faint quirk of a sardonic, pained smile on his lips. “You’ve lost me, Dru. I’ve long since stopped living in the moonlight. If I burn up in the sun, then that’s my destiny. Call me lost.” And he let go of her hands. “Goodbye, luv. Best go before something bad happens to you. Wouldn’t wanna see you hurt.”

Drusilla stared at him for a long moment, as if seeking an answer… and then something turned jagged and broken in her eyes. With a shriek of agony, she pivoted and flew at Buffy, her hands curled into claws and visage breaking into game face.

Buffy was moving without thought, turned on the bed to catch the demon coming at her; had her up against the cave wall in a trice and growling her own primitive sound, and she wasn’t thinking, she wasn’t… Tunnel-vision was close, she was a hair-trigger away from slick, thoughtless moves and simple, mindless motions, and…

“Let me, Buffy. Please.”

Her mate was before her, his face familiar and hers, his features elegantly brutal and eyes glowing gold before her. And the link between them throbbed with assurance. She nodded once, released her quarry to his hands. He had handled this one for many years, would do so again.

“Grr-ruff!” the other vampire commented as her mate took charge, led that one away, placed her in the bonds dangling from the ceiling close to. She did not struggle, simply watched with interest, amber eyes glowing on Buffy. “Slayer is speaking truth to riddles right now,” she commented, and tilted her head to eye Buffy strangely. “Truth to riddles, riddles to truth, too many riddles…” And she began to laugh; hard and fast, though the laughter began to strangle away very quickly into tears. And then her head was hanging down between her arms, dangling from the chains, and she was weeping. “And there he is; my deadly boy, only here for you. My knight, here for you, and you’ve got a new way to walk through the riddles, and when my riddles come, they’re all twisty without a guide…”

It brought Buffy back from the brink. The agony in that insane voice. Brought her back from the near-subsumation by her inner demonside, knowing what Drusilla must have gone through during most of her existence, torn between the two poles of her own nature. Because it was one thing being occasionally yanked back and forth between human and demon. Another entirely being torn between two kinds of demon. She had watched that battle inside Angel, in that throwdown between Egyhon and Angelus inside her ex's body. She couldn’t imagine the kind of struggle must occur on the daily, every second, inside Drusilla as two much more similar demons struggled for ascendancy over her being, her oracular nature, her destiny, and her place in the grand scheme of things; even her moves on the vast chessboard of the universe. It sounded much more intimate and much more terrible; like being ripped to pieces at a cellular level, every second of every day. 

As Spike finished binding his sire and stepped away, Buffy shook off the haze that had nearly engulfed her and moved cautiously closer. Pulled in a deep breath. “I can’t imagine,” she informed her competitor quietly, “how incredibly difficult it must be, every second, to deal with what you have to deal with. I don’t even want to know. And I don’t know whose sick game it is, your existence. I’m sorry for it. But it’s not my fault. I didn’t choose to let him go. You did, and you gave him to me. You knew he was meant for me from the day I was born…”

Clouded, befuddled eyes jerked up to hers, dark and flaming as Dru’s game face faded and her human visage resurfaced in confusion. “The pixies said he was yours. But when I made him they said he was to be mine. Mine for ever so long. I wasn’t ready to let him go…”

/And I get that. But you messed him up bad, Morticia. You have no idea how many trust issues we’ve had to work through, how many walls we’ve had to break down./ Buffy had to bite back a few choice remarks, fought with herself to remember empathy. /This is at the very least a Potential Slayer who got demoned up by my ex, to torture her for the remainder of an endless existence. I need to feel bad for her, not be angry at her for what she did to survive. What she’s still trying to do to survive./ “I’m sorry,” she managed on a stilted breath, “but you did, and he’s mine now. And he’s not coming back to you.” Reaching behind her, she fumbled in the air till she felt Spike’s hand find hers; a familiar, cool weight and a grip sure as life. “He’s _my_ knight now.”

Drusilla’s eyes left hers, rose over her shoulder. “Not nice to change the game on me while I was out for tea, Spike. I came back into the house, and instead of couples tennis you’ve turned it to blind man’s buff. But you’ve given me the scarf instead of the Slayer, and taken her hand and run away to leave me walking into the furniture alone, while you’ve gone off without me to have scones. I think I shall be very cross with you when I’ve taken off my blindfold.”

Spike sighed, low and regretful in the dark. “Sorry, pet. I guess I didn’t expect you’d still be playing at all.” Moving to sit on the bed, he shot a glance at Buffy, who shook her head. She couldn’t sit. She had to stand, watch Dru, couldn’t trust the chains. “Here’s the thing, Dru. I need you to go on back to LA. Take Darla and run along before the Slayer decides to make a side-trip down there to deal with the both of you, or the other one does. Last thing I want is to see you dusted, and right now her forbearance is already nothing short of legendary, considering you just walked in and fucked off our bitty Valentine’s Day scene…”

God knew that was true. “The only reason I haven’t dusted you is because it would hurt him… and because I know we have more in common than I want to admit.” Buffy sighed in her turn and rubbed a wrist bone hard into her forehead, seeking for patience. “God.” She focused then on Dru’s eyes. “How do you do it? With the battle going on inside your head constantly? How do you keep going, every day, with two demons fighting it out in your head every second?”

Drusilla eyed her with a strange look in her eyes, then tilted her head in a move rather like a bird’s. “I… listen. Sometimes Miss Edith will say one thing, and sometimes it’s the pixies. If it’s the pixies, Miss Edith gets quite angry, and I have to punish her for the things she says out of spite.” Madness crept into Dru’s dark eyes, and her voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. “She can get very naughty. Very, very naughty.” Her eyes took on a haunted cast. “And sometimes, when she speaks, the other one becomes angry enough that it can open its mouth so wide that it will someday eat me. Gobble me all up; gobble up little Drusilla, swallow me like a whirlpool, swallow me down into the quiet dark…” Her eyes widened; wider, wider. “And finally it will all stop, stop, yes…” And she began to laugh; the sound of madness, and despair, and a thin, desperate edge of hope. 

/Oh, God./ 

“Fuck…” Spike whispered, and rose from the bed. Drew closer, something sick but set in his face. “Do you want me to free you, luv?” He swallowed, a pained sound, and Buffy could feel it rising in him; revulsion and agony and a firm decision. “I will if you… If you need me to.”

Buffy closed her eyes against the enormous, tearing pain it caused him to offer. This was his sire. He had spent a century and a quarter fighting to heal her of the damage that had been done to her by another. Had thrown all his not-inconsiderable love into the pit of despair that was her lost soul, only to be tossed away like garbage when he could not measure up. And still he loved, would offer up all that was left of his peace of mind if it would help to free her of her agonizing existence. He was a wonder. 

Drusilla lifted her chin. “You may, if you wish, my Spike. The pixies say that I still have a part to play. If you turn me to dust, I will be brought back. We all have work to do. But it would be nice to rest a little, before the great finish.”

Spike trembled, the complex swelling of emotions in him making his entire being quake. “Do you want that rest, Dru?” he asked.

“Spike.” Buffy laid a hand on his arm. He couldn’t do it. He shouldn’t be the one. If Dru really wanted it, she could…

He rounded on her. “Do you think I  _ want _ to do it, Buffy?” he demanded, and his expression was drawn, almost demented in his agony. It roared through him, a pain like no other she had ever felt from him. “This is  _ Drusilla _ , pet! I know you know, but do you  _ know? _ Do you really understand what she means to me? Before you, she was the face of my salvation!” 

It hit her hard, like a blow with a piece of furniture. /Oh. Well, I guess that… makes sense./

He was looking at his sire now, a faint smile on his face. “She delivered me from mediocrity. For over a century we...” He hesitated, then shrugged, as if he were saying, ‘in for a penny’. “…Cut a swath through continents. A hundred years, and she never stopped surprising me.” Reaching up, he lightly caressed Dru's cheek. Buffy fought with herself as the mad vampiress leaned into his hand.

“Never stopped taking me to new depths,” he whispered. “I was a lucky bloke just to touch such a black beauty.” 

Drusilla smiled, responding to his praise. “Aww,” she murmured, sounding hypnotized. She was quietened, her previous despair pushed aside for a moment… and in that instant Buffy saw what Spike had done for her for all those years. He had anchored her. Without him there to care for her and to give her someone to care for in turn, she was lost. 

But why, if she had re-sired a grandsire, wasn’t she similarly anchored, now? That was why she had done what she had done with Darla, right? They no doubt also had a sexual relationship, knowing vampires. Spike had all but confirmed it when they had discussed the matter before. They were a ‘family’ again over there in LA. 

Why did Dru need Spike—an unattached Spike, to boot—if she had Darla?

Unless it was just that not having him, knowing that he belonged to someone else, made her crazier. 

Or was it just something specific to Spike, to how he worked with be-demoned Slayers, that was specifically helpful? That could very well be true, considering how he had adapted to the dreamscape. Not to mention the way Buffy could attest he calmed her and talked her down and adapted to her own personal feral, demon-y moments. After all, it was all one demon, right? So the demon that was inside her would have already known him, and known him well, for a hundred and twenty years. Would have specifically chosen the man she had, to house and train its companion; to be its anchor amidst the storms while it fought the constant threat of negation, an internal battle with its opposite. 

The demon she shared with this woman had helped to create, and then been intimately involved with the same man she now knew and loved; for over a century. It would have long-since accepted that he had destroyed some of its vessels; ones who wanted surcease, and found in him a worthy adversary as much as a fulfilling mate. 

There was a reason it had kept him around for so long. 

Which meant… /Oh God./ That side of her would have already known him when he’d come to meet her here in Sunnydale. That sense of recognition in her when she had first seen him, and his for her? It made sense. It all made sense now. Her demon and Spike had a lot of pre-Buffy history. Which was a weird thought, but… Well. Really, all she and Drusilla had done was simply passed Spike on from one body to another, in the same way that the demon which inhabited her skipped from one Slayer to another at death. Like an inheritance, almost. Usually the demon passed on when the woman died, except that like Buffy, Drusilla had not died completely before being kept animated, linked to another demon that rushed in at the last second. The Slayer-entity inside of her acted as a second soul, an essence to animate the body, It would have clung to the body, gotten confused during the transition no matter what happened to the human soul. And then when the other demon came in to take up residence…

/You kept your link with our shared demon. And you’ve been hanging round, this leftover of the Line—like me—while the rest went on, like me and Faith, for a hundred and fifty years. This Line is so tired of being split, and of fighting with the other side of itself inside of you… By this point it probably wants to heal the breach bad enough that it decided to have this relationship with that other side of the coin as, like, a healing thing. So it tried with Spike and Drusilla, but it couldn’t heal, because Dru was already all torn to pieces, already linked to another vampire, so it couldn't mate the Line with him./ 

Dru had already been wrecked, by another demon. But because of that, their shared entity also had a lot of history with another vampire. Which might also explain a lot about Buffy’s pre-Spike history, and dammit, maybe there was a reason for her being inextricably linked to one very specific demon family, her attraction to one very specific set of demon guys, before her inner demon finally found rest not with the one who had so damaged a previous vessel, but with the one who had been in training for a hundred-plus years to bring a new one peace. 

And all of that struggle had been channeled, for better or worse, through the woman who had come before her, and now stood here in their bedroom. Which meant... “I can’t let you do it, Spike,” Buffy heard herself say aloud. “It would destroy you.” /And, probably a part of me, too. Even if maybe it’d give the Line peace, in the end, to heal this split. Even if she probably wants the peace in herself. Because I’d feel her go, because we’re a part of each other. And it doesn’t look like my mating the line has helped her much./

/Because if the Slayer side of her is maybe steadier, the vamp side of her got abandoned at birth, and hasn’t really ever been given her due./ 

Touching Spike’s hand, she moved in close when he hesitated, waited till he stepped aside. “And, Dru, I don’t think I want to. I feel like we have too much in common. With who we’ve loved, and who we’ve needed. So here’s the thing. I’m going to go have a talk with Angel, and see to it that he takes care of you, one way or the other. He needs to stop being a big damn baby, and fesses up to his responsibilities…”

Spike made a sound halfway between a growl and a hiss. Buffy laid a hand on him once more, behind her back, stilling him instantly. “You never wanted Spike anyway; not really. You wanted Angel to come back and be what he promised you to be. He made you. He tore you apart. Maybe it’s time he put you back together, or at least was a part of your life again. And right now he’s refusing, so you gave up and came here for your replacement ‘daddy’ again. But Spike’s not available anymore. So give me a second to go talk some sense into Ang…”

“Daddy won’t come. He burned us.” Dru’s voice trailed off into a lost-sounding, little-girl whine. “He’s lost, lost…”

/He's just being a self-involved dork./ “We’ll see," Buffy answered, grimly determined. This drawn-out saga had gone on long enough. "There might be something we can do to help you, in LA. He might know… resources or… I dunno. Something.” /Something to heal the breach in her? Kill the part of her still hanging onto the Slayer demon, so she can rest? What reason could the Powers have for keeping her two-natured like that? Seriously?/ 

Buffy turned to Spike, caught his eyes. “You’ll have to stay, watch over Dawn and Mom while Faith and I go. We still don't know for sure that they're safe..." Spike was already looking mutinous, so she reached out to touch his forearm. "And let's be real. Your history with him is just too icky." His eyes juddered away. "Besides. You know he’d spend the entire time being pissy about the bond thing, which'll just tick you off more, and be this whole huge distraction. I need to get him back on track and get this over with. It’s destroying too many people.”

Her guy didn’t breathe at all before he spoke, and when he did, his voice was tight, clipped. “Buffy…” he whispered, and she felt the agony in him. Drusilla had been his responsibility for so damn long that the idea of someone else taking her on felt like faltering at his post, letting her down, letting down everything he had ever known.

Buffy touched his fingers lightly. “She’s a part of me too. Let me do it, just this time.”

His tight nod felt like loss to her, but he gave it.

Buffy turned back to Drusilla. “No offense, but we’re going to leave you in those chains for a little while, until I’m ready to head back with you. I need to make a couple of calls, okay? I’ll be back to head back into LA with you in a few hours. Just… relax…” She reached back to catch Spike’s hand, tugged him toward the ladder. They had unfinished business. And they needed to talk. Make sure they were okay. Bonded, before she left, or he might be too messed up over this while she was gone.

Once upstairs, she watched the hole for a second, uncertain. Spike relieved her concerns with a sharp, brisk shake of his head as he shoved the stone lid over the hole. “She’s secure enough. She’ll be fine. She likes being bound. Finds it comfortable, not havin’ to be in charge of… controllin’ herself.”

/Ouch./ While all of it, her conflicting impulses, tore her apart. God, what an awful, incredibly long and agonizing unlife Drusilla had led.

Spike turned back to Buffy, eyes everywhere but her. “Buffy…” he went on then, all the breath of the word held tight in his lungs.

She caught both his hands, drew him close to her. Closed her eyes, breathed him in; his scent, his nearness. /You are  _ mine _ . You are only mine./

Dru’s scent was on him. Just a little, but…

Her hands spasmed on his flesh; an involuntary movement that had her nails digging into his forearms. He shuddered slightly beneath her touch, crowded close to bury his nose in her hair. 

Buffy found herself abruptly incredibly desperate to prove that he was hers, knew it was a primitive thing, some sort of probably highly demonic drive that had little to nothing to do with her human faculties, had to fight a growling sort of noise in her throat. Felt herself tugging at his forearms, dragging him closer.

The growl won. “Fuck,” she heard herself grind out. 

He dragged his cheek over her hair. “Not goin’ anywhere, Slayer,” he answered, but he was shaking. The interview with his sire had done a pretty decent job of tearing him in half, if only for a brief moment, and  _ no _ . He was  _ hers _ . 

Buffy felt her voice shake as she tugged him toward the couch. “I need to…”

“I know,” he answered, before she could even finish, and went with her.

She stumbled back, dragged him with her, half-turned to push him down. “I need us to remember who we are. I need to claim you before I go, or I’ll lose my mind.”

“Fuck,” he whispered in his turn, and half-crawled over her, half let himself be dragged, expression abruptly fierce. Caught her up. She grabbed him, pulled him in without a single moment’s hesitation, and flung her legs around him to drag him in close. And flipped them, holding him hard inside her. 

“Bloody fuck…” And then he was up against her cheek; still and breathing hard into her hair, and her nails were digging into his back, and oh. She only now realized that she had left serious claw-marks in his shoulders earlier, when Drusilla had first shown up. She hadn’t realized until now just how tightly she had been holding onto him, to keep him close and hers. 

Loosing him now, she ran her fingers lightly over the livid marks. She opened her mouth, wanted to tell him she was sorry; wanted to tear him apart more, found herself driving him instead with her hips.

“Shut the fuck up, Slayer,” he informed her, hard and heated, and he was drilling up into her with everything he had as she slammed down and swiveled onto him, and she forgot what she had been thinking, forgot apologies, forgot everything to bite his lip as he poured it all into her; his fear and his anger and his pain and rage, his aching sense of being a traitor to them both. She drove it into him; her own fears, her own possessive frustration, fisted his hair and locked her heels under his ass to drive herself hard against him while he dragged down hard against her shoulders, his fingers digging blunt and ferocious against her neck and shoulder blades like a shiatsu of need. And she heard herself, as if from some great distance, exhale low, shuddering sounds that rose with every impact as they drove each other higher. “Goddammit, Buffy!”

Pulling him in with all the strength she had, she twisted, fought to bring him closer, angry in her turn that someone else who had had him longer had tried to come back, take him away. “Mine,” she informed his ear, traced the arc of it, seized his shoulder and dragged him in hard against her mouth. “You’re  _ mine!” _

“Nnnnn!” he agreed, and ducked his head down, burying his face next to hers, presenting himself for possession. And as he rose, and she crashed hard into him, and everything became just a keening whirl of mutual ascent before the drop, she fixed her teeth around his cool, shuddering flesh, and dug her fingers hard into him… and bit down while she came. 

“Oh fuckohgod!” he whispered in her ear, and she heard the sound of his fangs coming out in response, felt his face go bumpy against her cheek as he moaned against her, and spilled himself. 

They stayed like that for a long time before she realized that, unfortunately, she was going to have to go back downstairs to dig up her clothes and find her phone.

***

‘You’re kidding! She just waltzed in there while you two were doin’ the nasty and stepped up into your scene? That’s fucked.’

“It wasn’t my favorite, for sure,” Buffy answered with a sigh, and switched ears with her cell phone. Trust Faith to come up with pithy commentary for the recaps.

‘Did you dust her?’

Spike grunted in that half-sardonic-amusement, half-irritation thing of his and rolled over—as much as was possible on the couch, anyway—to allow her a little more breathing room. Buffy shifted with him, draped herself over his smooth, cool body. “No, because I like my vampire not all depressed. But I think maybe I need your help with dealing with her…”

‘That’s a first.’

“Just listen, Faith. I wanna take her back to LA, shove her in Angel’s face, and remind him that she’s his responsibility and he needs to put up or shut up. He decided to turn either a Slayer or a Potential Slayer…”

There was a sudden, fierce rustle at the other end of the line. ‘The hell you say!’

“…And it’s about time he deals with the mess he made, instead of running around the city like a big damn child trying to pretend like what her and Darla do isn’t his problem, because she remade someone from her family just to have anyone around to keep her on an even keel, now she doesn’t have Spike anymore. Because she  _ never _ had Angel. Not really.”

‘Hold up, B. Are you saying that the reason your boy’s sire is such a fuckin’ mess is because she already had half a demon in her before she got another one shoved up her ass by our boy Angel?’

Spike huffed a sour laugh. Buffy almost joined him, but settled for a wry, “That’s the running theory. Though, I’m sure being stalked and tortured and probably raped, and having him kill her whole family—and probably her Watcher—in front of her didn’t help.”

The short pause on the other end of the line finally devolved into awe. ‘Holy, holy goddamn shit. No wonder the girl’s such a fuckin’ basket-case.’

“I’m just saying.”

‘Hell. Also explains why your boy’s got such a hardon for Slayers…’

Buffy rolled her eyes at her sister’s blunt language. “Yeah, we figured.”

‘Shit. Okay, well, are you two done with the Valentine’s Day boinkfest? I’ll head on over and we can pick up little Miss Nuts ‘n Screws and head down to LA.’

/Yeah, Valentine’s Day. Sure./ “You think we could go back to romantic after all that?”

A vicious snort from the other end of the line. ‘Who said shit about romantic? If it was me and my guy’s ex walked in and interrupted a nice little scene we had going, I’d drag him off and bang his lights out afterward to show him who his ass belonged to. No question.’

/Well, okay, fine, Detective Faith./ Buffy poked Spike hard in the ribs where he had dissolved into unhelpful chuckles beneath her. “We’re currently getting dressed. I’ll run over and take a shower at the house before we leave.”

‘Uhuh. What’d I say.’

“Meet me at my house.”

‘Gotcha.’

Buffy closed the phone before her too-aware sister-Slayer could read her mind any more, then turned and buried her face in Spike’s nummy, spicy shoulder. “I don’t wanna leave you.”

A hand rose, drifted up over her spine, from thence into her nape, played with her hair. “Make it quick, then, love. I’ll see to it Red picks up your homework an’ the lot for you…”

/Oh God./ She’d completely forgotten about school. “Damn Angel. If he would just take care of his responsibilities, I wouldn’t have to go do any of this crap.” 

Another low chuckle, deep in the chest where she currently held real estate. “Welcome to my point of view since approximately 1890.”

“Ugh.” Buffy dug her fingers briefly into his left pec, then sighed and unstuck herself from him to turn over and lay on her back on his body. “This is dumb. The whole thing.” 

“Mmm.” A cool hand drifted up, caressing her lightly from hip to shoulder, lightly brushing her right nipple. She shivered. “I’ll take care of everything here, and keep the home fires burning. When you come home I’ll be here dyin’ for you to touch me, and your territory and everyone in it will be safe as houses.”

“I love you, Spike. You know that, right?” Buffy closed her eyes at the sensation of his drifting touch, cool and paradoxical, the way it could set her afire. “And I… I know how hard that was for you. I know that you could’ve gone with her, for a while. Gone back to…”

“No.”

Buffy bit her lip. “I’m just saying… we would’ve dealt with it. I know how much a hold a hundred-plus years has on you. I’m not going to hold it against you, how much of a struggle that was; or even if you would’ve broken, for a little while. I know that when she was tugging at you, all of the associations…”

Blunt teeth closed, hard, on her shoulder, till she stilled to silence. When they released her, “I may have spent over a century being what she taught me to be, but I’m wholly yours now, Buffy. I more than love you. I’m more than bound to you. You're all I bloody think about. Dream about. I don’t dream of blood, of the chase, of the past. I don’t think of what I miss when I hunt. It’s only you; there, looking at me, the sun in your hair, the smell of it on your skin. You're in my gut... my throat...” His voice faltered, and he buried his face against her neck. His hands shook. “I'm drowning in you, Summers; every moment. I'm drowning in you, and it doesn’t matter anymore, like it once did, if it’s right or wrong or insane. Doesn’t matter, like she said, if it’s destroying everything that was me, until all that's left is you. I’m a stripped-down house with you living inside of me, and all I know is I’ll be whoever you need me to be, as long as I’m what you need.” 

Buffy closed her eyes, and shook with him. “That’s so much responsibility, Spike. It’s like Angel with Dru. I didn’t mean to… To hollow you out and make you into something that can only exist for me. I wasn’t trying to do that.”

He nodded against her neck. “I know. And I’m workin’ at it. At trying to figure the other out. Who I am as well, outside of you. Give me time, pet. I’ve spent a human life and now this one livin’ only for who the women in my life have needed me to be. And I know I need to learn as well who I am, beyond that. Give me a little time. But in the meantime…" His voice rippled with passion, gratitude. "That you’ve taken me on, given me a reason to be this? You’re so soddin’ _generous_ about it. It’s more than I’ve ever had.” He paused for a moment, as if working something out in his head. “I know my mother was afraid for me. She worried that when she died I’d be alone, because I didn’t know how to live without a woman to give me purpose. That’s what I tried to find the first time around. It was a hit and miss. I swung with one and lost, then struck and hit on Drusilla instead, and fought to make that work for so many bloody lifetimes… and never got anything back, with any of them, since Mum, till you.” 

When she turned in his arms to watch his face, he smiled at her. “It makes me want to rest and be still, just be this, for you, because you give me enough back. But I know I can’t. It’s not fair to you. You need a whole man.” The backs of his fingers brushed her face. “So I’ll figure it out. Just give me a bit more time, love, to learn who that is; because it’s the one thing I never did have or take the time to learn, before I died… and didn’t have the chance at all, after, till now.”

Buffy reached out, cupped his cheek. “I know. You were always too busy taking care of everyone else. But I want you to. I want you to take care of you, too. Figure out who you really are, between the William at the center, and the Spike armor, and all of it in between.” She kissed his lips, smiled. “I feel like I know you, but until you do…” She shrugged.

He nodded. “I bloody well love you, Buffy.”

“Do you know how lucky that makes me?” she asked him. /He would’ve stayed. No matter what, he would’ve stayed. Oh my God, how did I get so unbelievably, amazingly lucky?/

***

Spike wasn’t looking at her while she finished getting ready. Instead, he eyed the glowing tip of the cigarette he wasn’t smoking. “I know she released me, but I’ll always feel like Dru’s my responsibility, and you shouldn’t have to deal with her because I fell down on my job.”

Buffy shook her head as she pulled on her boots. She had changed her mind on what footwear she wanted to bring after they’d returned to the crypt. “She’s not your responsibility, Spike, and she hasn’t been for a long time, if she ever was. You’re  _ her _ kid, not the other way around.” Making a face, she zipped a stake into the left boot, another into the right, and made to push herself to her feet. Saw his hand held out to tug her up. Caught it, let herself be pulled to her feet. “She’s always been Angel’s. You just got stuck with the tab.”

Faith, hanging around in the doorway waiting, shrugged in her leather jacket. “She’s got a point, Blondie. You’re like the kid who cashes in the SSI checks every week so his mom doesn’t piss it all away on drugs, and pays the rent and buys the groceries at twelve while mom’s doped up on the couch or spun out because she needs meds and never got ‘em, and Daddy skipped out to go bang the secretary. Good for you for finally bailing when you turned sixteen and decided to get a life of your own.”

Spike growled low in his throat. “I don’t need a human metaphor. I’m a bloody vampire, not a helpless fucking child.”

“You tell ‘em,” Buffy murmured as she reached for her purse, then turned to him before he could get pissed off enough to break something. “Hey. I need you to talk her into sticking with us. You know her. Do that for me?”

He sighed, flipped one hand in the air. “I’ll do my soddin’ best, pet. No tellin’ if she’ll listen.”

Twenty minutes later they were settling into the DeSoto, Spike muttering imprecations the entire time about loaning out his precious baby to the uninitiated. They would be taking turns driving while one of them sat in the back seat the entire time with a tied-up Dru, who was bound with the be-spelled restraints they had bought from Tauvin. 

Faith had lifted her eyebrows speculatively when Spike had whipped them off of the bed to transfer his ex from one set of bonds to the other, though she had wisely kept all commentary to herself, sealed behind an amused eyebrow-tilt and a faint smirk. Buffy, though, expected at least a half-hour of snarky interrogation on the way south. 

“Here, luv,” Spike was saying as he ducked in under the driver’s side back door. “Just have a bit of it. Do you good. You need to heal, and you know bloody well you’ll not get another meal for a bit, two Slayers watchin’ you.”

Drusilla frowned mazily at the mason jar of blood Spike held out to her. “Poor, sweet Spike, forced to drink blood with all the life drifting away from it. Leftovers from those less than him; like cattle held in a barn so long they have forgotten the taste of grass…”

“Just bloody well drink it, Dru!”

“…Forgotten how to hunt, how to be a monster, forgotten to be anything but a doggie on a leash, hunting for a mistress who would beat him if he goes astray…”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “I wouldn’t beat him, you dork. We’d figure out how to accommodate his needs better. And he hasn’t forgotten how to hunt. He just hunts a different way, now.”

“All so cordial. Friends with the cattle, knows all their names, pets them; such a nice little zoo. Goes to visit their children in the park, doesn’t he. So very tame; like Trafalgar. Lions and tigers who haven’t seen the jungle since they were born, don’t remember how to be wild… So simple, so easy…”

Spike sighed and shoved the jar of blood at Buffy. “In case she decides she’s hungry.”

Buffy took it, set it beside her on the seat, wedged in between the console and the passenger side. “She doesn’t look hungry anyway. She probably ate someone on the way into town and we just haven’t heard about it yet.” /I was, after all, kind of distracted. Bad Slayer…/

“I’ll find out about it, love, see to it…”

“Nice little snacks on a nice little train full of nice little dollies all waiting for the conductor. But he comes to take the tickets, and none of the little dollies can answer him, because they are sleeping, and their eyes are open, but no one’s home, they sing to me, tra la la…”

“Well, shit,” Faith put in as she moved around Spike to slide into the backseat. She picked up Dru’s legs and sat down, plopped them down on her lap. “I don’t even wanna know how many that would be.” She frowned at their captive, then up at Spike. “Color me confused. I figure, no matter how hungry she was, all crispy like she is, one or two should do it, right?”

Spike shook his head and pushed away from the door, eyes dark and frustrated on Buffy’s. “Yeah. That would be enough. But Angelus taught us to slaughter everything in sight, and make it a party. Get everyone’s attention.” Something tightened in his tone. “And Miss Edith taught her that making everyone around her into a nice set of dollies with eyes watching everything she did was the way to make sure that no one would be around to tell the pixies that she was doing wrong.”

“Oh,” Buffy whispered, and felt the dread of it coil through her. She had wondered which one ‘Miss Edith’ was; the Slayer spirit, or the demon. She still wasn’t sure… but one way or the other, it was a measure of the torment Drusilla went through, to hear things like this. 

“She used to hurt her dollies,” Spike informed her, so quietly that only they could probably hear; Buffy and Drusilla. “I never knew why. I always thought it was because of what soddin’ Angelus did to her. But now I…”

“See no evil,” Drusilla whispered from the back seat, and giggled. “Hear no evil. Bad girls and good girls, all in a row.”

“Holy shit,” Faith murmured, sounding disgusted.

Buffy’s mouth tightened; almost as taut as Spike’s heart. Angel had a lot to answer for.

***

“We don’t know where Angel is. We don’t care…”

“Wow,” Buffy answered, and leaned back in the rickety chair she had chosen in the current offices of what was still being called ‘Angel Investigations’. “That’s kind of intense coming from the girl who used to, like, completely champion him to me, all, 'He’s doing the right thing and we’ve got LA covered, blah blah blah'.” 

“…And bringing us your problems,” Cordy went on, swinging her arms wide to encompass the bare room with its shelves full of old, rare books, its single desk and cheap coffee-maker. “We’ve got enough stuff going on on our own here, and our own vampires to deal with…”

“Hey!” Harmony’s voice drifted in from the ‘lobby’ area, sounding offended. “You don’t ‘deal’ with me! I answer the phones, and provide a much-needed public service to your stupid, weird detective agency. That is, until I can get myself a better job. Because I  _ will _ be discovered, Cordelia Chase, unlike you, who is somehow totally happy living in this dumb life doing this dumb job with these weird, ugly people…”

“Suck it, Harmony!” Cordelia tossed over her shoulder without pause. “I told myself the same thing, and here I am, a year and a half later. Don’t knock it. We keep you fed and out of trouble.”

“Yeah, on  _ cow _ blood, which, ugh! And you don’t even have Angel here anymore to keep me all, you know, ‘be good, or I’ll stake you!’ I don’t know why I’m still here and not down at Club Mayan, feeding off of the cutest guy in the line…”

“Because Gunn will stake you,” Wesley put in. He sounded a little breathless as he said it, because he was in a wheelchair. No one had told them yet  _ why  _ he was in a wheelchair.

“Or I will,” Cordy put in blandly without skipping a beat. “You’re using up too many of our long-distance minutes answering fake agent calls to Cincinnati. There aren’t a lot of acting jobs for vampires in Ohio.”

“Actually, there is a small hellmouth in Cleveland,” Faith put in lazily.

“Oh, yeah?” Cordy answered, sounding interested. “Huh.”

“Be that as it may,” Wesley cut off the apparently ongoing debate with firm decision, “I fail to understand why we should field your Drusilla issue, being as Angel is not currently available to manage her.” Man, he had changed a lot since he had left Sunnydale. He sounded so… decisive. Something tightened in his face, making his already gaunt-looking expression and slight five-o-clock shadow turn to something hollow and fierce, and his voice went rough. “He is not currently a part of our investigative team, nor do I foresee a time when he ever will be again.”

“All I know is, he better not drag his sorry ass back in here begging for us to let him back into our good graces, after what he pulled. He walked out on  _ us _ .”

Buffy blinked at the sheer, betrayed rage in Cordelia’s face and voice. This wasn’t the sort of bitchy shade she would’ve thrown in high school if someone had flipped her a ration of shit. This was… 

Man. She was seriously, deeply hurt by Angel’s defection. Like, on a personal, emotional level. Almost like…

Like they were an item, and he’d broken up with her. /Damn, maybe Faith has something with this whole Angel-Cordy thing./ 

Well, not her circus, not her monkeys. “We didn’t exactly bring her down here thinking we were going to dump her in your laps. It was more kind of, do you think we can spitball a way, all of us together, to get him to acknowledge his responsibility to her and sit down and take care of the situation? Since, you know, you say he’s spent the last however long trying to hunt her and Darla down?”

If possible, Cordelia’s face turned even more sour. She looked like she’d sucked on a  _ saladito _ * from the corner market. “Yeah, not so much, Buffy. Nice try, though.”

Wesley broke in at that. “Unfortunately, I believe Cordelia’s assessment is correct. Angel’s obsession was largely concerned with locating Darla.” His voice went bleak, uninflected. “Her running with Drusilla was largely a matter of secondary importance in his mind.”

/As always/ Buffy thought wryly. /Poor Dru./

The spurned vampiress, currently sitting tied up over on a nearby office chair with Faith on watch, rocked a little and rolled her eyes skyward. “Mummy’s baby needs dancing and new shoes. We’ll fetch a frock or two and a pair of nice boys to eat and spin and spin and spin under the stars until Daddy finds us. Then we’ll dance, dance, dance together, all along the edge of the world…”

It hadn’t just been vengeance, her turning Darla. Spike had thought it might have been a kind of emotional revenge for the years of torment Angelus had visited upon her before and shortly after her siring, but it was more than that, wasn’t it? She would use Darla, if it meant getting her ‘Daddy’ back; use his need to ‘save’ or doom the sire who had in turn doomed him to his demon life. That was why she had sired her, aside from needing a companion with blood-loyalty to her, who would stay. Oh, poor girl. 

If Angel had forgotten her, cast her aside, she would make it impossible for him to do it again, and get her revenge on top of all that, for his having driven her mad and taken everything from him, by taking away the human life of the sire he had thought to save from a second soul-rieving.

He really, really needed to grow up, acknowledge Dru, do something about her. She deserved his attention, his affection. He needed to stop putting her aside because she was inconvenient, or didn’t align with his current self-identification as a worker of good deeds. /Not that you’re really doing those at the moment./ Sure, it would be tough for him, whenever it was that he came back to try to ‘help the helpless’—because he would. That was all he had left, to prove himself—tough to manage a job like that while also managing his insane childe… but it was his task far more than the rest, and if he could be made to see it, far more a matter of redemption than anything he could do out there on those streets. His people here were doing a lot more helping the helpless right now than he was, currently. He could for damn sure spend a little time helping this one helpless person he had cast aside a hundred years ago after he’d had his way with her. /Talk about redemptions you never bothered to try, because they’re too much work. What did you tell yourself? She’s beyond saving? Well, did you ever bother to give it a shot, Angel? Because you also said Spike was beyond saving, and look at how  _ he’s _ doing!/ 

He’d also said demons don’t change, but that was clearly a lie too—because, again, Spike as case-in-point—so he needed to get on this. 

/It’s not like you’re doing anything else useful right now. No one even knows where you are, much less what you’re doing. It’s not like you’re making a huge noise in LA right now fighting the good fight./ Actually, the more she thought about it, the more she was kind of disgusted with her ex over this whole damned thing. 

Turning to Faith, she lifted her eyebrows. “Rock, paper, scissors?”

Faith frowned. “Actually, you know, I think this one’s yours, B. You have a pretty huge personal stake in it, which means I think you can put the beat-down on our guy with a lot more passion than I can if you find him.”

Buffy made a face, then sighed. “You got me there.” Pushing herself to her feet, she nodded at all concerned. “Any ideas at all where I can…”

“Hey, what’s with the business meeting?”

Buffy looked up to see a really kinda hot-looking young Black guy walk into the lobby. 

“Hey, sweet-stuff,” Faith called out as he sauntered in. “How ya been?”

“Hey yourself, girl,” the guy answered, and shot her one of those looks; the kind that said they’d hit the sheets at least once just for the hell of it. “What’s up with Morticia, there?” He frowned, stilling in recognition. “How’d you catch her?”

“She came up to Sunny-D to harass Buffy and Spike,” Faith answered with a shrug, and popped her gum. “They tied her up, finished their V-Day calisthenics, then we hustled her down here to see if we could dump her in Angel’s lap.”

The guy turned his gaze onto Buffy, eyebrow raised. “Hey, it’s the girl herself. Good to finally meet you. I’m Charles Gunn.” And he held out his hand.

Buffy had heard the name. Apparently this guy was a crack vamp-fighter; all human, just a hardcore brawler with serious tools and a thing for taking out whatever went bump in the night. She took the hand and shook it gravely. “Heard you’re good with a stake.”

“Have been known to dust a vamp or two.” Bright brown eyes assessed her with lively intelligence, then he smiled in a way that lit up his whole face. “Never got down with any. You’re brave as hell, I’ll give you that.” 

Buffy smiled as she dropped the hand. “That’s the consensus. Brave, or insane.”

Faith snorted behind her. 

“Woulda said that too, but you’re a Slayer. You mighta popped me one.”

Buffy shrugged. “No, it’s all good. I’m used to that reaction.” She smiled at the sweet-seeming guy. “So, what about you? Have you seen Angel around? Heard anything about where he might be lately?”

The kind face closed up like iron bars. “Man, I got no idea where that guy is and I don’t wanna know. He bailed on us. That’s all I need to know.”

Jeez. They were all so hurt; like they had all been so incredibly close to Angel, had learned to depend on him so hard, and then he had just… left them.

/And oh, don’t I know what that’s like./

Buffy felt her eyes drawn ineluctably toward the oldest vampire in the room. /And, crap. So does she. Because he did it to her first. Oh my God, this is like a  _ pattern _ of his, isn’t it? He lets you love him, he gets you to depend on him, and then he just… leaves./

“Daddy’s gone up to go down. He wants to find the devils, find them in their home so he can beard the dragon in its lair.” Drusilla was back to doing her mazy-sounding singsong of prophesy. “Of course he will find that where they live is right here, in his own backyard. That the dragon’s cave is in the city, not the far mountains, and that the monsters are all inside of everyone. He doesn’t want to believe it, wants to think they are all unicorns, and not serpents. It will destroy him, to learn that what he fights for does not exist, and he will fall, fall, fall…” Drusilla’s ditzy voice trailed off into peals of laughter. “Silly, silly Daddy, chasing daydreams. There is no rainbow, no pot of gold. There never was.”

Buffy sighed and buried her face briefly in her hands. They had listened to Drusilla’s insane ramblings all the way down from Sunnydale. Spike insisted that it all actually meant something, and maybe it did, but she so did not have the patience to try to parse meaning from that kind of gobbledygook. 

“Oh, my God…” Wesley murmured, breaking into her thoughts.

“What?” Faith demanded, sharp and irritated. “No way you got something out of that, Wes.”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t, Faith. He means to beard the dragon in its lair. To go to find the Senior Partners in their home dimension. ‘Gone up to go down’… Gone up the building to go down to wherever they live. Except…” He trailed off briefly, as if parsing meaning from the nonsense. “He’ll find that they… they don’t live in another dimension at all. That they dwell right here, in this city…”

“The hell you say,” Gunn exclaimed. He had been about to take a seat on the edge of the scarred desk, but now he sprang to his feet again. 

“And realizing this will send Angel off the deep end, into total despair.” Wesley’s voice trailed off into something that sounded like regret.

“Well, great. That’s just great. He’s gonna give up on the fight because the Senior Partners run the city. Like we didn’t already know that!” Cordelia sounded thoroughly irritated by this revelation. “Well, whatever. Angel can go off the deep end if he wants to. We still have bills to pay. Harmony!” she snapped. “Any other calls come in besides those idiots with the kid?”

“No, but if you want to have one of those vision thingies, now would be a good time.”

Cordy’s voice turned offended. “I don’t have them on demand, Harm!”

Behind them, Drusilla was still giggling madly. “Daddy’s going to make a baby…”

Buffy whirled, gaping. “No way he’d sire another vamp. Not when he refused to deal with the last one he sired with a soul! He doesn’t want to deal with the ones he already has!”

“Wait, hold up. Angel sired someone while he had a soul?” Cordy demanded, sounding amazed.

“Yeah, back during World War II. Sam Lawson. A soldier on a submarine. It was this whole anti-Nazi-vampire-experimentation thing. You had to be there.”

“Wow.” 

“Yeah. He kind of dumped the guy after they got out of the sitch and in sight of land.”

“Typical,” Cordy humphed from behind the desk. “Well, this has been all kinds of fun, and as always it’s a pleasure seeing  _ you _ , Buffy, but I need to go home and wash the Angel talk out of my hair. A girl can only take so much.” Pushing herself to her feet, she waved a hand. “Let me know if I have to worry about your crazy friend here stalking me.” And coming around the desk, she laid her hands on Wesley’s wheelchair. “C’mon, Wes. Let’s go before they rope us into some kind of vampire-babysitting gig.”

“If it was a paying gig, I might consider it,” Wesley answered, sounding half-convinced.

“You wish,” Gunn put in, clearly amused. “We haven’t had a paying gig in, like, a week.”

“You could always come to the Mayan with me, Cordy,” Harmony called from the lobby. “I know there are some talent-scouts…”

“And then I’ll fall down in the middle of whatever modeling gig, screaming about eyeballs on the back of someone’s head, and they’ll think I have nightmare epilepsy. End of acting career.” Cordy flapped a dismissive hand, looking exhausted by her new life as a medium for Powers-gifted visions… and also years removed from the vain and self-involved girl Buffy had once known. She wasn’t even wearing designer clothes; just stuff that was cute-but-practical. It was an outfit Buffy herself would wear these days.   
  
“You go on, Harmony,” Cordy went on wearily, and headed for the door. “Don’t eat anybody.” 

“Oh, please, like I would be that stupid, and eat someone who’s offering me a job in this stinking town. I need to get away from you people way too bad to do something that dumb!” Swinging her purse to her shoulder, the blonde vampire bounced out of her seat out front and pranced ahead of Cordy toward the exit. 

“Uh, Buffy,” Cordelia called as the LA group fell in line behind her, “this would be your cue to pick up your crazy bloodsucker and find somewhere else to stash her.”

Buffy sighed and pushed herself to her feet. “So much for helping the helpless,” she shot wryly at Faith. 

“I wasn’t counting on the big welcome,” Faith answered, and tugged their captive up to join her. “C’mon, Wednesday. We have to go find us a nice motel or something.”

“Grandmummy and Daddy are having a nice little moment as we speak…”

“Neato. March.”

“Wait.” Buffy flung up a hand, halting everyone. “You’re saying Angel is with Darla right now?”

“Daddy fell down, down, all the way down, and broke his crown, and Grandmummy came tumbling after. But she only followed just to pick him up. She’s hoping he’ll be all broken like Humpty Dumpty after his great fall. All the king’s horses and all of his men couldn’t put the spark back into Daddy… She wanted him to join her in the dark…” A pained pout. “But all she did was light the filthy spark back up in him, didn’t she? And then he lit one in her…”

Buffy frowned, working her way through that. “He did something to Darla… that made her have a soul?”

Drusilla burst into a fit of the giggles. “No, that would be quite terribly ugly on her, like an ill-fitting bodice, all pushed up and too tight. But she’ll run, and run, and run, and see the doctor.” Out of nowhere Dru started to sing; a strange little creaking tune. _“‘Oh, don’t let me faint, someone get me a fan, someone else run for the medicine man! Everyone hurry as fast as you can…’”_ And her eyes went dark and distant. “Is there a potion that will cure me? Give me a pill, give me a nostrum, give me a sign… but there will be nothing, nothing, nothing to set the parasite free…” The sing-song lyrics returned. _“‘For they cut all her stitches away, and found the seat of the terrible ache, for none of the surgeons had ever before performed on a dolly’s inside, they tried to re-stuff her but didn’t know how, and this was her wail as she died…’”_

“All-righty-o,” Buffy muttered, and joined Faith in frog-marching their ranting captive toward the door. “Someone needs to write this stuff down, and then we need a translation or a key or something.”

Faith shrugged one-shouldered. “Call your guy. He’s great at translating Earth-to-Drusilla.”

Buffy half didn’t want to bother Spike with it, since it would only highlight for him that he wasn’t here dealing with something he considered his responsibility on an instinctive level, but part of her knew for a fact that when it came to understanding the crap his sire spouted, she was in way over her head. If they missed something important because she was trying to be careful with someone’s feelings, or out of pride, that would just be a plain idiotic thing to do. /So suck it up, Buffy, and we’ll deal./ “True. I’ll call him after we get settled somewhere.” 

Wesley was frowning from his wheelchair as they joined the herd at the door. “Too bad she can’t act as a compass to tell us where they are.” At Cordelia’s censorious stare, “Not that I’m all that concerned to see him again, you understand, but if they’re getting into inordinate trouble together, then we ought to be prepared.”

Buffy stared at the man who had purported to be one of their Watchers at one point. “I’m disappointed in you, Wesley. Of course she could find them, if she wanted to be cooperative. They’re family. She could walk right up to them, anywhere in the city. The only reason Angel didn't find them sooner is because the soul screws with his antenna, and this time around Darla didn’t sire him. Dru sired _her,_ so it’s a little backward, and took longer to get through the interference. By the time he got to where they were, they were always gone already.”

His expression did a slow, pained revolution, somewhere between amazed and embarrassed. “Oh. Yes. Quite. Sensing the bloodline. I’d forgotten.”

“If he’s with Darla right now…” Buffy turned to Dru, caught her face, stared into her eyes. It was like looking into deep, dark pools without any bottoms; whirling ones. Man, no wonder she could so easily hypnotize people. She was barely there as it was. It was probably way too easy to ‘be in her’. “Can you feel them? Which way are they?”

“Can’t interrupt,” Drusilla informed them dreamily. “They wouldn’t like it.”

Sighing heavily, Buffy caught her arm and dragged her into step beside them. “Well, they’ll have to deal. C’mon.”

About twenty minutes later they were standing beneath a balcony window several floors above them in some  random, formerly snazzy-looking ex-hotel building. Buffy could just make out that the sliding doors were open, curtains billowing out into the night air. 

“Huh,” Faith muttered as they gazed upward. “Fancy digs.”

“Daddy likes a pretty nest.”

This had to be that one hotel Cordy had told them Angel had dug up for them to set up shop a while back. It was kind of along the lines of the mansion in Sunnydale; big, old, fancy. He had certain tastes; something she had once upon a time admired in her ex, since it had fit in with her whole 'marry a rich guy' vibe a lot better than his once-upon-a-time, much more humble underground digs wherein she'd lost her virginity.  
  
Buffy made a face. Ah, memories. “And he’s up there now?”

Dru lifted her long, bare arms, did a little hip-swiveling dance as if ignorant of the bonds dangling from her wrists to end one in each of their hands. “Not now. They had their time, all writhing like snakes,  _ hissss hissss _ ; coiling about together,” and she thrust her hips very pointedly a couple of times. “But the nasty spark wouldn’t go, just like before…”

/And now we have proof that Angel can bang just fine without losing his soul./ It didn’t exactly hurt anymore, so much as feel like a vague, dull sort of blow; like being hit with a nerf bat weighted down with car parts. /Oh well. It isn’t like it really matters to you anymore. He lied, it wasn’t about you, it was about him, he messed you up for no reason… and it’s way over anyway./

“…He left angry,” Drusilla went on, sounding viciously let down, “and Mummy's baby left angry, and now…” Her face turned down into a pout, and tears fell from her eyes like a sudden rain. “No Daddy, no Grandmum for Mummy to love. No one here, all alone again…”

“Well. Shit,” Faith put in succinctly. “Guess he can at least bang another vamp without getting a case of the pissy-fits. Good to know.”

Buffy shrugged it off with an ease that she hoped looked natural. “Yeah, I already figured that. Not sure why he thought he could lose it banging Darla. They went there and did that way back when.” /Yay, my voice isn’t even shaking./ Turning away from the building, she hit number one on her speed-dial. “We need to find a place to hole up, or we’ll be wandering all over the city all night looking for him. Maybe Spike can unravel all the Dru-speak we’re getting and help us, I dunno, triangulate his position.”

“Whatever you say, B. This whole thing is turning into some kind of crazy-ass wild goose-chase. I need a cigarette and, like, a whole, loaded pizza.”

“Round and round and round we go, and where we stop, nobody knows…”

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 _Saladito_ = a dried, salted plum, very popular snack in Southern California; to be found in stores which sell foods with a Mexican cant. They'll turn your face inside out. Nummy. You know, if you're into that sort of thing. My cousin used to eat them by the bagful, stuffed into the center of a lemon, after which she'd suck on the lemon, because why not up the sour factor to a 9.8?  
  
The lyrics quoted by Dru were from: **"I've Got a Pain in My Sawdust (The Plaint of the Little Bisque Doll)"** , a popular song during the Depression. Music composed by Herman Avery Wade, lyrics by Henry Edward Warner, song originally copyrighted in 1909 by Joseph W. Stern & Co., but the rights were bought for publication in the US Edward B. Marks Music Co. of New York in 1920. More recently known when it was used in an episode of _CSI_ (to very creepy effect) in the early 2000s, by a ventriloquist with a dead daughter, if anyone remembers that.  
  
It seemed like the sort of thing that would appeal to Drusilla, even before it became useful to describe Darla's knocked up state of affairs, lol.


	36. Chapter 36

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How did it get to be Tuesday again?!  
> I owe you all much love and replyingness. Argh. But until then, here's more. (Honestly, though, how did this week fly by so fast? Y'all are catching up on my "padding" right and left in every series, omg!)

‘Tell me again, love, the bit about ‘grandmum following Peaches down’, or whatever that rot was?’

Buffy frowned in concentration. “Something like ‘Daddy fell down and broke his crown, and Darla came tumbling after’. But that she only fell down to pick him up like Humpty Dumpty, because she wanted him to go with her into the darkness, but instead she accidentally lit his spark back up…”

‘And he lit one in her? That doesn’t make any bloody sense, Buffy. The soddin’ soul isn’t catching.’

“I know, and when I asked Drusilla about it she said no, that it wouldn’t fit her, or that it would fit her all wrong, like… I don’t know; a bad-fitting dress or whatever. That she was going to run and see a doctor, or a… A medicine man, to find a potion to cure her. And then she started singing some kind of song about a dolly being stitched up or something; which was, by the way, some weirdness. So clearly something happened to them both while they were…”

‘Shagging,’ Spike finished for her, blunt as ever. 

“Yeah, okay, and what’s a nostrum?”

‘A quack cure, Buffy; like snake-oil. The sort of thing you seek out as a last resort when nothing else works and you’re bloody desperate.’

“Oh.” Buffy was really at a loss. “What the heck could have gotten into Darla from them doing the wild thing that would’ve made  _ her _ need a… cure?”

‘Dunno. But she said for sure that the spark didn’t leave, yeah?’

Buffy nodded, though he couldn’t see it. “She was pretty convinced about that part.”

‘Well, that’s something. He’s a useless git with the thing in him, but he’s at least less of a sodding bastard.’

Buffy exhaled hard, seeking patience. “What I want to know is what she meant by, ‘they made a baby’. Did she bring him someone to sire? Would he have stooped so low? Was he that screwed up in the head?”

‘Wouldn’t be the first bloody time.’

Buffy wanted to groan, or throw something. “Yeah.” And it was the last thing they needed. Jeez, he already had two unaccounted-for childer to take responsibility for as it was. /Dammit, Angel, stop being a deadbeat dad!/ “Well, do you think we’re on the right track with the whole using Dru to track him?”

A long, slow sigh over the line, then, ‘Much as I hate to admit it, since it’ll hurt her, she’ll do it because she bloody well longs to be with him… and she’s just about your only hope of finding him, so yeah. Go to it, love. She’ll happily be your bloodhound.’

Buffy bit her lip at the tight pain in his voice. “How are things there?” It was a clear subject change and he’d know it, but oh well.

She heard the dismissive shrug in his tones. ‘Nothing much’s changed since you left, Buffy. ‘S only been a few hours. Give it a day and a half at least before you figure we’ve run ourselves off a cliff, innit?’

“Twenty-four hours,” she countered, just to have some reason to prolong the conversation.

She heard the laugh in his voice as he signed off. ‘Bloody well love you, Slayer.’ 

“And I love you.” As much for his quicksilver nature as anything; for how swiftly he could turn his mood around.

‘Better do, me puttin’ up with all this rot for you.’ She could hear the smile in his voice, the warmth there, as the  _ click  _ sounded.

/Hey, I’m putting up with your ex/ Buffy shot back internally as she hit ‘end’. 

Turning to Faith where they sat cross-legged on the motel bed, Buffy shrugged. “He isn’t sure,” she summarized.

“Great.” Faith turned back to their captive, currently tied to the one chair in the room. “So what are we gonna do with Miss Nutso here?”

Buffy smiled at Drusilla, not unkindly, but with calculation. “Use her to track down Daddy.”

Drusilla’s eyes kindled. “Will you make him keep me, Slayer?” she asked softly, and there was almost two hundred years of paean in that small, yearning little girl’s voice as she said it.

Buffy leaned forward to pat the lost woman’s satin-clad knee. “Dru, I’m damn sure going to try.”

***

‘He’s with me,' Wesley informed them ever-so-politely, over the phone. 'We’re heading to a house in Glendale. Woman whose daughter was infected with demon-spawn…’

‘Who are you calling?’ Angel, interrupting all suspiciously. 

Wesley’s voice went taut. ‘Do you honestly think that’s any of your business at this point in proceedings?’ 

There was a short, angsty-sounding pause, then Wes went all brisk again, ‘Never mind. Just get me into the car.’ 

Gunn’s voice broke in, distant and tinny. ‘Naw, he doesn’t need to help you. I got this.’ The line went dead.

“Well, that’s our signal to get moving.” Rising, Buffy headed to the chair to untie their bloodhound.

***

They screeched to a stop in the middle of the street, arrested by the sight of a man in cowboy boots swaggering out of a really old jalopy of a truck. Older even than the DeSoto; the kind of vehicle where you had to guess at the color. Maybe once upon a time it had been orange. The guy looked ready to murder as he grabbed something from the bed and march up to a crumpled mass of leather on the side of the road. This in itself wasn’t all that dangerous-seeming, until one registered the fact that the something he had grabbed was…

Well, that was different. The cowboy had a sledgehammer dangling from one hand. 

“Baby’s pet is very angry at Daddy,” Drusilla informed them conversationally. She sounded only mildly interested, now that she had gotten them to where Angel was. Which was, as far as Buffy could determine, on the side of the road in a heap; the victim, apparently, of some random dude’s road rage? 

“Stay here,” she informed Faith, and put the car in park. 

“Aw, I miss all the fun,” Faith bitched, and leaned out of the back window to chase her down with her voice as she marched out to cut off the bastard with the hammer. “Don’t go easy on him, B. That’s Lindsey MacDonald. He works for Wolfram and Hart. He was the one who resurrected Darla.”

“Fun,” Buffy muttered as she interposed herself between the cowboy lawyer and Angel’s crumpled form. “That means I can hit you.” And while the guy stared at her in surprise and worked to hitch up a sneer for her diminutive form, she cocked her fist back and let fly a medium-power punch to knock him on his ass. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s bad manners to hit someone with a sledgehammer when they’re already down? Or, you know, that attempted vehicular manslaughter is a crime?”

Having gone ‘arse over teakettle’, as Spike would have put it, the dope with the farm tool pushed himself up on his elbows to blink at her, scraping one arm up underneath him for purchase… which was the much-belated moment that Buffy realized he had a false right hand. “Yeah, well,” he spat words with a gout of blood, “something tells me they didn’t have vampires in mind when they wrote that law. In fact…” And he sat up, spat out another gob of blood and maybe a tooth, wiped his mouth with his animate left hand, “I know they didn’t, since I’m a lawyer.”

“How nice for you.” Buffy crossed her arms and glanced over her shoulder. “Angel, get up. We don’t have time for a siesta. Your friends need your help, and then we need to talk.” As she jerked her eyes back to the unknown quantity that was the not-really-lawyerly-looking dude on the asphalt, she heard the familiar rustle-scrape-grunt that was her ex dragging his butt up off the concrete. 

“Let me guess,” Lawyer-guy—Lindsey, Faith called him?—said as he pushed himself up to his knees. “You’re Buffy, right? Figures that Angel’s other girlfriend would come into town to have his back, even though he’s been off banging mine…”

Buffy rolled her eyes. Was  _ that _ what this was about? Okay, wow. “A, I’m not his girlfriend, and haven’t been for, like, two or three years, depending on how you do your math. Also, way taken by a totally different vampire, which, I guess means you guys are totally behind the times down here for such an all-knowing demon law firm. Which sucks, because I seriously considered hiring you a short while back for something, but I might just reconsider…”

“Buffy!” Still only halfway through his pushup, Angel’s shock was real. 

Buffy ignored him. “B, if Angel had sex with Darla, it really wouldn’t be the first time, since they were together for, what? Around two hundred years? Maybe more? I dunno what your relationship is with her, if you even have one that’s not wishful thinking, but I really think you can’t top that.  _ Drusilla _ has more of a relationship with her than that, so I’d quit while I was ahead if I were you, dude, because you really can’t beat out vampire family values when it comes to dibs on doing the nasty. You’re just fooling yourself if you think you ever could.”

Lindsey stared at her with an expression that read something akin to hate. “It isn’t  _ like _ that. We aren’t  _ like _ that! I was there for her when she was lost! When she came back and had no one! Then he swooped in and…”

“Had a history with her you can’t ever touch?” What a sad, delusional dope. “Sorry, guy. It happens. My guy has a history with his ex I’ll never be able to get near with an excavator. I have to live with that. Heck, he has a history with  _ Angel _ here I can’t touch, and that’s a level of weird I don’t even  _ wanna _ get into.” Shaking her head, Buffy dismissed him to glance back at Angel, who had managed to get to his knees, was slowly pushing himself to his feet. “Live with it. If you love her at all, you’ll deal.”

She glanced back at Lindsey, now back on his feet. His face had set into lines of rage. He brandished the sledgehammer. “NO!” His eyes darted back to the vampire behind her, blazing with near-madness. “Tell me! Tell me everything you did with her…” 

From behind Buffy, Angel scoffed as he resolved to an upright position. “Nope. Sorry. A gentleman doesn’t tell. You’ll just have to live with the proceeds of your no doubt wild imagination, Lindsey.”

/Oh my God with the gloating./ Reaching back, Buffy seized one slick leather sleeve and gave it a hard jerk; one strong enough to set her ex staggering. “Angel, you’re not helping. Go get in the car, we have places to be.”

“Buffy, who says I’m gonna…”

“Just go. I don’t have time to fight with you. Besides; you have business to attend to in there.”

Just like that, he turned into whiny-boy. “I don’t wanna be in Spike’s car. It stinks; like stale cigarettes and old rum and…”

Buffy whirled and glared at him. “Get in or I’ll punch you.” As she spoke, she swung one hand up to catch the overhand blow from the sledgehammer that flashed over her shoulder. “Listen. Maybe you’re slow on the uptake, Lindsey. This fight is way over. Go home. Nurse a bottle of tequila or something. You lost the girl. Whine about it. Call a hooker or whatever. Take up taekwondo. But bail, before I have to hit you again, because I don’t like beating up humans.” She didn’t even deign to look over her shoulder as she said it, just ripped the sledgehammer out of his one hand and threw it away from him. 

It landed with perfect accuracy in the back of his truck. Well. Almost perfect, in that it broke his back window. 

Angel started snickering at the sound of shattering glass. /Oh my God./ “Shut up Angel, and get in the car. You sound like a twelve-year-old.”

Angel cut off and sighed. “Yeah. Sure, okay. Fine.” Slumping, he turned and headed for the DeSoto. She followed him, leaving a chastened Lindsey MacDonald in their dust. 

Angel halted as if shot with a tranq dart the second he sensed Drusilla. Crouched a little to peer into the car, as if he could see through the gummed-up windows. “Buffy…”

Faith rolled down one of the rear ones. “Okay, now he’s here, can I take shotgun? I’m way tired of playing guard-dog. And don’t get me wrong, she’s hot in a kinda Mistress of the Dead way, but I think she’d rather loll all over tall, dark, and fangy here than me…”

“Buffy, what did you do?”

Buffy gave him a shove toward the back seat. “Don’t look at me. She came up to visit, tried to lure Spike back with promises of home and family and mayhem. I couldn’t just send her packing; she was too pathetic, so we brought her down for you to handle her.” Off his wince, “She’s your responsibility, not ours; one you’ve avoided for way too long. Now, get in the back. Faith needs a break.”

“Oh, man. I can’t even fit back there! I have the longest legs…”

Seriously, with the whining? “And I have the shortest. And it’s a short drive. You’ll fit behind me just fine. Get in, Angel,” she snapped, “and give the girl a thrill. She’s missed you like woah.”

Drawing in a deep, pained-sounding breath, Angel ducked his head and entered where Faith had exited the rear seat. “Hey, Dru,” he ventured tentatively.

“Bad Daddy. Burned us all up and then never came back for tea and crumpets…”

“Yeah. About that,” he answered in curiously soft tones, “Darla’s going to be late. She might never come home again…”

“Grandmummy’s very angry. She’s going to see the medicine man. But that’s alright, Mummy will forgive baby. She has her own to look after. Will you look after me, Daddy? I’ve had no one to love me for ever so long…”

“Ah, I…”

The discomfiture in Angel’s voice was hilarious, and righteous, considering the century he had spent gallivanting around after having dumped this problem in a fledgling Spike’s lap. “Don’t worry, Dru,” Buffy called over her shoulder as she put the car in gear, “we’ll see to it you get plenty of quality time with your Daddy.”

“Buffy…”

“We’ll discuss it later. After we make sure Cordelia doesn’t die.”

“Right.” He subsided then, and focused on fending off the amorous advances of his wayward childe. Which took some doing, since restraints or no restraints, Drusilla was making no bones about it. She was a body with a purpose, and that purpose was to seduce her sire back to his proper house once more. She was clearly set on making the most of the time she had.

“Dru! Dru, this is hardly the… Dru!” Angel’s breathless, startled exclamations were probably funnier to Buffy than they really had any right to be, as he fended off his childe’s determined assault in the back seat with what sounded like increasing desperation. Drusilla was a very creative person, considering she was tied variously to a door and a bucket seat. And, Angel deserved all of this and more. And okay. Buffy kind of found it hilarious to hear her normally self-possessed and in-control ex sound so shocked and anxious and pushed to the edge of his cope. Was that bad? 

After a few minutes of wrenching, rustling, and exclamations, though, Buffy sighed and relented. “Just use a command, Angel, jeez.”

There came a faint slapping noise, some rummaging sounds, a kind of high-pitched ‘eep!’ “Silly Daddy. Sunshine doesn’t care anymore if you play in the dark. She has a new knight…” 

Sitting beside her in the passenger side, Faith had long since dissolved into hysterics. Her earthy chuckles filled the cab in counterpoint to the cries and singsong protestations going on in the back seat. “Fuck, this is better than a movie. You got any popcorn, B?”

Buffy was so not going to glance behind her. “Dru, can it maybe wait till you get him somewhere with a door? Not that I mind, per se, but I need him at least partially dressed and paying attention when we go to fight these Skeezy-demons with the three eyes…”

“Nasty Skilosh, planting babies in heads to look at you, watch you, watch you everywhere… Watch you fucking, join in with nasty tongues… Want your nasty tongue, Angelus, and your nasty prick…”

_ “Dru…” _

Okay, definitely didn’t need them banging in the back seat while she was trying to drive this thing. It was tough enough to concentrate with the whole ‘barely a slit to look through’ deal. The last thing Buffy needed was to get pulled over with the way the window was blacked out. Having a couple of vampires bondage-screwing in the back seat while she tried to talk to a cop would really just top off the evening. Also, just no. “Oh my God, Angel, just tell her to stop.”

Angel’s voice was incredibly tight when he answered. “Commands don’t work anymore since the soul. Or… Dru! Not as well… They get…”

“All muddy. Silly spark. Daddy can’t tell baby what to do, can he? Grandmummy couldn’t tell Daddy what to do either…”

“That’s not exactly… Dru, please. I could still feel the pull, but it wasn’t as strong…”

Buffy had heard that, but it had never occurred to her that it worked top-down too. Weird. “Good to know,” she half-murmured as she checked every mirror in sight—thank god their struggling cargo of vamps didn’t show up in the rearview—and merged over a lane. “Not that it helps us right now, but good to know you couldn’t’ve told Spike to back up off of me, or…”

Angel hissed, and she heard another slapping noise. “I could’ve,” he answered bitterly, “before you did your idiotic bullshit with the claim, which  _ believe _ you me, Buffy, we’re gonna have a talk about that. What were you  _ thinking? _ But with—for God’s sake, Dru, we’re in a car with two Slayers!—with Dru it never worked as well anyway; or only half the time, for some reason. Like it skipped in and out, or only worked on half of her brain…”

Faith grunted sourly. “Well, that’s what happens when you turn someone who already had her own kind of demon in her, Angel, you idiot. Only one of those demons has to listen to you. The other one can tell you to shut the fuck up.”

“Huh?”

“Speaking of,” Buffy broke in while her ex sat stupefied behind her. Righteous fury had filled her, very abruptly, from the moment he thought he could say a single word to her about her claim with Spike. Between that and the interruption of her Valentine’s Day, Dru’s attempt to take Spike away from her, and now all this rigmarole, she was feeling salty as hell. The pool of irritation peaked, and it all came roaring out before she could even remotely check her mouth. “From said demon and yours truly… Shut the fuck up.” 

“Buffy!”

It rose in her; a long-buried thing. Rage at him for what he had done to Dru, and then done to her, and left for Spike to try to fix,  _ twice _ , before wandering off to go live his life somewhere else like it didn’t matter. /Like she didn’t matter, like I didn’t matter; like what you did to us didn’t matter. Like what you did to Spike didn’t matter. No one matters. Just your own ‘redemption’. We’re just something you can point to and say you’ve made mistakes and now you’re gonna do better, this is your sin, you’re gonna redeem yourself. But not by helping us. We get left in the dust./ “Angel, what I do with Spike is none of your goddamn business. Focus on your childe, and on your team here in LA, alright?”

She could feel him gaping at her, amazed and horrified. She didn’t look back or meet his eye, invisible in the mirror. She just drove.

Faith swung around in her seat, a dark grin in her voice. “Hey, Morticia. Here. Shut him up.” Out of the corner of her eye as she turned onto the Interstate, Buffy saw her sister-Slayer hand back something long and black. “Just don’t actually screw him while we’re in the car, okay? No one needs to hear that.”

“Oh, look at the pretty toy! How sweet of the Slayer to hand us a nice treat! Look, Daddy…” Drusilla’s voice lowered to something dark and excited. “Daddy’s little girl doesn’t get to bind him up very often.”

“Dru…” Angel sounded panicked now.

“Hush, Daddy. The Slayers say it’s alright to quieten you, for a time, so long as I follow the rules…” 

“Buffy, you’re not going to let her…” There was a flash of a lunge, and Angel’s voice cut off abruptly into gargles.

“There. All nice and tied up in pretty ribbons; like a parcel, just for me.” Dru sounded highly satisfied. 

Angel started making high-pitched whistling sounds around the gag, Faith was chuckling again as she faced forward… and man, it was going to be a long-ass drive to Glendale.

***

Between helping that Gunn guy to keep Wes upright so he didn’t keel over—apparently he’d actually been shot in the belly recently or something?—and fighting off a bunch of Skilosh long enough to get him in close enough to sprinkle some fairy dust over the back of Cordy’s head so she could  _ not _ give birth to a baby eyeball-demon like, as Wes put it, ‘Athena bursting from the head of Zeus’, it was a long night. Angel actually acquitted himself well in the fight, even though he was literally tied to his wayward childe while he did it. They would’ve left him in the car with her and taken care of things themselves, but he practically begged them to let him help—“It’s  _ Cordelia _ , Buffy!”—and really, it wasn’t like Drusilla was going to wander off anywhere now she had her precious Daddy in hand, so they just sort of cuffed the two vamps together with Tauvin’s fancy bindings and left Angel to explain himself to his peeps.

Cordelia had apparently found the image of her would-be rescuer appearing with Drusilla tied to him to be an unwelcome sight, though the others seemed to at least recognize the effort involved. Once the situation was resolved, they made their farewells to the AI team and dragged a chastened Angel back to the motel with them. At which point Buffy and Faith resolved to take shifts watching Drusilla and her very cornered-looking sire. Not that Dru was going anywhere fast, but Angel was definitely a flight risk. The mortified elder vampire would clearly much rather be bellying up to his former team and trying to work his way back into their good graces than dealing with his insane childe. He had for sure informed them before their departure that he would very much like to work with them again; not as their boss but as one of their peons, while he re-earned their trust. 

Their answer, though, had not been particularly heartening. Wesley, for one, had eyed him warily and said,  _ “I think perhaps, Angel, you have other problems to manage at the moment.”  _ _   
_

_ “Yeah,”  _ Cordelia had agreed.  _ “You look real busy.”  _ She had delivered the line with a level of snark and disdain only Cordelia Chase could lay down.

_ “She looks like a handful,”  _ Gunn had agreed.  _ “We probably won’t be seein’ you around for a while, while you handle this. Which… I mean, you were lookin’ for ‘em. Now you’ve found one. And she’s family, right?” _

_ “Yeah, but…”  _

_ “But nothin’.”  _ Gunn had cut one hand away from his body, eyes turning from sparkling and engaging to hard. _ “Man, we can’t always choose our family, but they’re still people we gotta deal with. I don’t ever wanna see my Aunt Elinor again, but I still gotta, every Easter, and eat her foul-ass mac ‘n cheese. You handle this mess. That’s what you should be doin’ right now. Right, girl?” _

_ “Yeah, whatever.”  _ Cordelia was having none of it. __

Wesley was willing to crack the door slightly, however.  _ “You should contact us once you have figured out how you will deal with the matter, and you are free to decide how you wish to move forward, yes?” _ And the three members of his former team had eyed him with closed looks and stepped into their various rides to depart.

Angel had, of course, promptly freaked out at his Slayer escort.  _ “See, look what you’ve done! I need to get back on their good sides, and I can’t do that when I’m busy babysitting…”  _

_ “Tough,” _ Buffy had informed him, and firmly shoved Drusilla’s bindings back into his hands. “ _ You’ve avoided doing the right thing for a century and a quarter.” _ She’d nodded toward the back seat, watched as a gleeful Dru dragged her sire back into their previous perch. Still gaping, Angel had ducked his head automatically while she shoved him happily in and crawled in after him like a slinky, predatorial black widow.  _ “Drusilla deserves your undivided attention for a while until we figure out what we can do to help her. You’ve farmed her out to everyone else for long enough, Angel.” _

Pinned back up against the driver’s side back door and splayed out like a deer in the headlights, Angel had shot her a glance filled with uncertainty.  _ “Buffy, I have  _ work _ I need to do in this city, people I need to…” _

It was way beyond enough, and way past time for that old excuse. It didn’t hold water anymore.  _ “Oh, because you’ve suddenly decided, conveniently, tonight, that it’s time to go back to helping the helpless and getting in good with your ex-friends again, after however long of not giving a damn? That’s great. But if you want to redeem yourself, Angel, maybe it’s time you looked a little closer to home first, tried for some more personal atonement than just helping random-ass people out on the streets. You have someone you’ve personally harmed right here, right now, needing your help. I get it if that seems too complicated to face, but forgive me if I don’t think it’s very admirable that you decided it takes too much day-to-day work to take care of your kid, so you bailed, and you’re looking to do it again.”  _

Her vituperation seemed to horrify and shock her ex, and he’d stared at her in amazement, but Buffy was on a roll by then. All of Spike’s decades of built-up resentment had come to a head, with the lost Drusilla between them; made so much sense now, in the clear-eyed retrospective of time and self-aware perspective. /And, okay; forgive me if I kind of have an issue with the subject of dads who bail./ _“I get you now, Angel. You’d rather help people you don’t know, where you can go in, fix a problem in a day and get out. You couldn’t even stick with me to fix what you’d screwed up with us, much less what you’d messed up with Dru, because let’s face it; what you did with me was a pale echo of what happened with her.”_ Frustration with him was still a new thing, without the faintest echo of his old blood-leash on her to leaven the irritation, or to gild her view with shining, loving light. _“So it’s time to get real, Angel. Are you in it for the long haul for a change, or are you gonna run like a scared kid because it’s too complicated, and just leave her with the wreckage again?”_

Angel had stared at her, blinking and open-mouthed at her vehemence. 

_ “Time to put up or shut up, Cochise,” _ Faith had pointed out succinctly, and popped a Funyun into her mouth as she took her seat at shotgun.  _ “Want me to drive, B?” _

Buffy had considered it, and realizing that maybe she could use a break, nodded and switched out to let Faith slide over. 

Now, back at the motel, Buffy stared down her cornered ex. “Time to show us what you’re made of. Time to show me that you’re really the hero you made me believe you are.”

Angel looked down at the floor between his toes for a long minute, his expression indicating that he was choosing his words carefully. Like maybe he thought she had lost her mind, before he shook his head sadly. “Look; Buffy. I’ve got a lot to do down here. I really don’t have the time right now to play nursemaid to a deranged vampire…”

Lying back on the bed with her arms spread out like a welcoming, drowned Ophelia, Drusilla made a hurt moaning noise and turned her face away.

Her pain didn’t seem to affect Angel at all. “I mean, I have friends to help, and a business to get back on its feet, and…”

Something inside of Buffy reached the end of its rope, cracked. “Oh, but you had all the time in the world to drop your business Angel, and your friends, to go traipsing all over the city looking for Dru and Darla. Except of course that all you wanted to do was save Darla, somehow, and Dru? You just wanted to  _ stake _ her, because God forbid you actually take responsibility for your own children…”

Angel gaped at her as if she’d lost her mind.  _ “Children? _ What  _ is _ this? Since when do you think there’s anything to do with soulless vampires but staking them, Buffy?” 

She glared back. “Since Spike!” /You idiot!/ “And… I sent you Harmony! You haven’t staked  _ her _ yet! Why are you so ready to stake a member of your own  _ family _ , unless you just don’t want to face your own mistakes and have them staring you right in the eye, reminding you of how you screwed up…”

“There’s no  _ saving _ her, Buffy!” Angel yelled, flinging his arm wide. “I don’t care what crap Spike has you believing! I know what I did, but she’s insane, and you just can’t change…”

Buffy was ready to yell right back at him, right into his face. “Don’t give me that, Angel! First of all, you fed me that same crap about Spike, and I’m watching him change every day, right before my eyes! Second of all, you dropped her in his lap and gallivanted off to do whatever the hell you wanted for a hundred and twenty years, so I think it’s time you did your  _ job! _ For the last hundred you’ve even had a soul, so you have no excuse for being a dick about this!”

Angel flinched back as if she’d backhanded him across the face.  _ “Buffy!” _

She was not about to let up. Not when he was being so willing to just run out on his family. Dads who ran out on their families were just not okay. Not okay at all. “Third of all, don’t try to pretend this isn’t some kind of pattern for you, or something you only did because you were soulless, because we all know it’s just a thing for you to not want to take care of your babies.” He recoiled hard. “Yeah,” Buffy came at him again, flinging a hand back behind her in exasperation. “Spike told me about Sam Lawson. You made him and then just sent him off into the sunset and never gave him a second thought; and that was when you had a soul, so don’t tell me you only did what you did to Dru because you were busy being evil!”

Angel drew himself up, mouth setting into a thin line. “I sired Sam Lawson because he was needed to save  _ lives _ , Buffy! But once I sired him he was a soulless vampire, and I couldn’t…”

“Oh, so it was justified, to destroy one soul to save others, and then just throw him away like trash?”

Angel flinched again. Buffy pressed him, because just, what?  _ “Fourth _ of all, if seeking redemption is your thing, here’s your big chance! Numero uno, right here. You can right one of the biggest wrongs you ever did! Balance the scales and all that crap; and it can even be on the same thing you messed up, instead of doing it some roundabout way by trying to figure out how much your wrongs weigh against a bunch of do-gooding on the streets at night! Fix  _ Dru _ , Angel! Make up for what you did to  _ her _ …”

Angel had also had enough, and burst in to interrupt, like a bomb. “I  _ am _ trying to seek redemption, Buffy, but there  _ is _ no redemption for what I did to her! None at all! And there’s no fixing her, so…”

“There is! And there is no way you get out of this, Angel!” Suddenly, Buffy was just  _ done _ . “God. You want redemption, but only on your own terms. And what those terms come down to is you just don’t want to do the real work! You want something clean and pretty, don’t you? You want to ‘help the helpless’ and feel real good about yourself at the end of every day. You don’t want to look right into the face of one of your worst crimes every night, watch her weep and gnash her teeth in front of you and beg you for solace. To face her need for vengeance against you, and her despair…” She had once hated Drusilla for torturing her then-boyfriend. But now? Now, she at least got why; the merest edges, though Spike would never really tell her about how things were in that nest. She probably didn’t want to know, but she could guess that Dru’s relationship with Spike had been the first real loving relationship Drusilla-the-vampire had ever experienced. “...To be at your wits’ end with no idea what to do to help her, and just pray that what little you did that night was maybe enough to start making up for it. You don’t want to be inconvenienced in any real way! You want to be free of the burden of what you did!” 

She couldn’t believe she had never seen it before now; the very real weight her ex-boyfriend had avoided for so long by thrusting that obligation on others. “But guess what? Spike didn’t commit the crime, and he was inconvenienced and burdened with the result for  _ over a century!  _ He cleaned up your mess, he comforted her, he wept for her, he held her and sat at his wits’ end with no idea what to do to help her, even knowing the entire time that he wasn’t the one she really wanted; because the one thing she needed was the one thing he couldn’t give, no matter how hard he tried! He couldn’t be  _ you!”  _

Stepping up, she got right in his face. “So now it’s time to man up and take your turn and be what she needs, finally. Are you gonna be that, Angel, or are you gonna punk out like you always do, duck and run and show me that you really are just a scared little boy deep inside who never once wanted to face a single responsibility, ever?” Such a pattern. “Right when I was leaving, Spike told me something. He said, ‘Liam’s not a responsible sort, Buffy. He fucks and runs. He won’t ever face up to what he’s done and do what’s needful’.” Out of nowhere, she found herself smiling at him, sweetly. She knew those two would probably compete and piss each other off till the end of time. “Now’s your chance to prove him wrong.”

Angel winced and looked away, something twitching in the corner of his eye. “I’m not Liam. Not anymore.”

“Oh yeah? Prove it.”

Silence.

Sighing, Buffy backed off to take a seat on the bed next to Faith. Dru, who had sat up in the interim, now bracketed her on the other side with her head tilted, as if hearing some song none of the rest of them could sense. She completed a trio of Slayers, two of them thoroughly screwed up by this man sitting across from them and one presiding as jury. And Buffy was abruptly very tired. “Look, Angel, here’s the thing.” Reaching out, she lightly patted Drusilla’s cool hand just below the soft binding. Drusilla smiled mazily and made a sinuous movement, as if enjoying the attention. “She was a Slayer, or at least a Potential before you sired her. She has two demons in there, aside from whatever’s left of the human you drove insane, pulling her in two different directions…”

Angel jerked, blinked in amazement. “What? That’s not possible! Even if she had the Sight, that doesn’t mean…”

“All the tugging, every which way… So many bright, shining stories…”

Buffy patted her hand again, and Drusilla subsided, her murmurings settling to inaudible things. “If it was just the human soul you drove nuts, then why would she still be crazy, if that soul leaves when you turn someone? No, there’s more to it. She had the Sight, remember?” At Angel’s gaping shock, she shrugged. “I’m not expecting you to fix that personally, since I think maybe the Powers might’ve had a hand in it. But you need to take responsibility for what you did. Now. Is there any kind of, like, therapy around for demons, or…”

Angel sat back in the rickety-looking chair, staring at her, at Dru, back again. “I…”

“Or, I dunno; maybe some kind of demon-exorcism that could remove one of them, while keeping the other one in place, so she could be less crowded in there, or…”

His mouth was hanging open by this point. “I…”

“I mean, assuming you don’t want her to be tortured like this forever…”

“So many voices. Always so many voices, calling to me; gnashing their teeth and snapping at each other. Grrr. Ruff!”

His mouth crashed shut, and his eyes blazed. “Of course I don’t want her to be like this forever, Buffy, but this is the way she is! Whether it’s just the torture I put her through or some sort of metaphysical… I did this to her, and she’s stuck like this! I can’t fix it and I can’t change it! There’s nothing I can d…”

Faith took her turn in his face before he could finish, one hand on either armrest and glaring. “Shut the hell up, Angel. We just  _ told _ you there was something you could do, and your big manly response is to throw up your hands and repeat your old ‘no can do’ mantra? You don’t even wanna try? C’mon! You’ll pull out all the stops for Joe Schmoe on the corner when he’s possessed, but you don’t even wanna look into it for your own childe? Just like you didn’t even wanna look into anchoring your soul when you were screwing Buffy? What the hell  _ is _ that?”

Buffy flinched, but, okay, that was real. Not that she’d ever really thought about it back then, but… /Fair./

Angel looked away, avoiding Buffy’s eyes. “There isn’t a way to fix that. It just is.” 

/Oh, right. There isn’t a way to fix anything. Life just sucks. God, what a line. What you mean is, you would rather suffer and be noble and seek some faraway, impossible ‘redemption’ than actually achieve anything, much less God forbid be happy. Don’t worry, Angel, I got that memo years ago. It’s cool; I’m way over it./

His mouth took on a truculent line then. “And we can’t fix this, either. Demons don’t change.”

Fury rose in Buffy yet again, overwhelming the exhaustion. For her own part, the argument was now a tired, weary thing. For her mate, though… /Oh don’t give me that shit./ “Spike changed,” she reminded him, firm and unyielding.

Blazing eyes turned on her, glaring dark, mordant daggers. “He’s got you upside-down and inside-out, Buffy. He’s full of it. You’ve bought the lie…”

“My Spike’s filled with the sun. It’s burning him from within. Hollowed him out, turning him to a prism, made of light. Never was meant to reflect the moon…”

Angel swung on his creation, snapped. “Oh, bullshit, Dru. Demons don’t change. Demons don’t…”

“Tried to change him, you did. Tried for a score of years. But my knight was true as an arrow straight, shot from the longbow of Robin Hood into the heart of Maid Marian, chaste as the snow to split me in twain. Shattered himself over and over, he did, for my sake, but the shaft of him was oak, and never stopped being what he was made of. Couldn’t change; anything but the costume of him. But you tried, my Angelus. Oh, you tried; to dress him, didn’t you, in your rags…”

Buffy’s mouth dropped open in awed realization. /Oh! She’s saying…/

Angel winced, shook his head stubbornly. “I showed him what he truly was.”

Buffy sighed and rubbed her hand over her face. “You showed him what you wanted him to be. And you turned a human girl into what you wanted  _ her _ to be, and shoved a demon into her. Except she already had one, and you didn’t count on that, did you, Angel? And now we have what’s left of all three of them, all smooshed together in someone who’s been splitting at the seams for a hundred and fifty years. And she deserves the break; deserves some peace. And, dammit, you’re gonna help her to get it, whether you like it or not…”

Angel was on his feet. “I don’t know how to help her, Buffy! I wouldn’t know where to take her, or who to…”

“Then get with your friends. Maybe Wes’ll know. Get with your enemies. Maybe these Wolfram and Hart guys might know. Figure it out…”

“Buffy, you don’t know what you’re…”

“In the meantime, stay with her and give her some company. She’s been majorly lonely, and it’s not like she has Darla around to keep hold of her kite-string, now you’ve run her out of town. You’re all she has left, now I’ve removed Spike from the family hierarchy…”

“Yeah; about that, Buffy…”

“Not right now,” Buffy snapped, cutting him off. No way she was going to let him make this about her and Spike. This was not a claim-debate. This was about him and Dru. “Stay with her. It’s on you if she gets away. I don’t wanna hear any excuses. If she leaves, I’ll know it was because you bailed on her; because you couldn’t face up to your responsibilities again.” She took one step closer to her ex, lowered her voice in intensity. “And if you stake her, we’ll have  _ words _ , you and me. You owe her way more than that.”

Angel stared at her in amazement. “Buffy, she’s a  _ killer _ . She’s…”

“And you made her one. It’s on  _ you _ .”

He gaped at her. “I…”

“She’s here in the morning. You’re here in the morning. We’ll make plans as soon as we’ve all had sleep. Deal. We’ll see you brunch-ish.” His mouth was still opening and closing when she stepped away. “I dunno about you, Faith, but I expect this to get loud. You wanna crash in a different room?”

Faith lifted the credit card Giles had given them. “Who’s the man.” Unfolding her long legs, she headed for the door. “Let’s make this quick. I want that pizza.”

Buffy made a face. It was probably going to end up being weird, sharing a bed with Faith, wasn’t it?

Oh well, it wasn’t like this wasn’t already the weirdest night on record.

They shut the door behind them, and Buffy flipped open her phone to call Spike on the way to the lobby to update him on the latest.

***

They ended up with the room nextdoor to where Angel and Drusilla were. Which was a blessing and a curse, since they could keep tabs on those two, make sure there weren’t any suspicious silences indicating a dusting or a disappearance… but also they had to end up listening to Dru’s rather forceful seduction of her ‘Daddy’. 

She didn’t give up easily. And in the end, it sounded like she got what she wanted, which was… well, not really anything Buffy needed to hear, since she was, unfortunately, familiar with the sounds of Angel  _ in flagrante delicto _ . Luckily, the symphony also seemed to be keeping Faith amused, and filled the air of their room with the kind of awkwardness that kept the vibe between the two Slayers mostly in the space of ‘god, this whole sitch is stupid-laughable’. Which was Buffy’s silver lining inside the whole ball of ugh that was tonight. “Do you have an extra pillow over there? Or, like, earplugs?”

Faith, lying there with her back to Buffy, snorted dryly. “Hey, it’s just like any other motel, girl. Pretend it’s music and ignore it.”

“Easy for you to say. You’ve never slept with him. Right?”

“Came close a couple times, but reminded myself we’re definitely better as friends. Didn’t want to mess up the system with that vibe.” 

“Lucky you.”

“Yeah, well; pretty sure you never did  _ that _ with him. You were too prissy back then.” And she chuckled again and tossed Buffy a spare pillow.

Buffy dragged said pillow over her head and closed her eyes, determined to sleep through the racket. “Thanks. And I appreciate it if you didn’t try to make me imagine anything that they’re doing.”

“Why would I do that? Sounds to me like she’s using those ropes of hers to tie him up and keep him there. I mean, now that we have  _ him _ , she has no reason to leave, right?” Faith snorted again. “I’d’ve never pegged her as a top with him, but maybe she’s pissed off enough to be adventurous.”

“She never was, before,” Buffy answered, and jammed the pillow down harder over her ears. “And thank you so much for that image. Good  _ night _ , Faith.”

Faith was still chuckling to herself in counterpoint to the shrieks and grunts floating through the walls when Buffy finally fell into an exhausted, stressed-out sleep.

The next morning Angel was definitely still there. As in, tied to the bedframe, still there, bound with the be-spelled restraints Buffy and Spike were absolutely never, ever using again for any reason whatsoever, and maybe Tauvin would give them a refund for slightly-used bonds? 

Probably not, considering they looked like they had really been through something with the Angel and Drusilla show last night, and maybe they should just throw them in the nearest garbage can. Yeah. Probably the best bet.

Spike sounded philosophical about the loss when she called. “‘S alright, pet. We can get more.” His voice turned businesslike. “Cleaned up the business with the train, Buffy. Faith’s bloke helped. Useful to have about, that one, with that military ID of his.”

“Oh. Right. How, um, is Graham holding up?” Buffy’s eyes flickered over to Faith, saw her shoulders tense a little, even if she was mostly pretending not to listen. 

“Bit lovesick. Bit worried about his bird up and dashing off all the sudden. Told him it was Slayer business. Not sure he buys it.”

/Because he has good instincts./

“How’s Dru holding up?” The query was somewhere between tentative and businesslike.

Buffy scoffed. “Well, considering she got to tie Daddy up and have her way with him for half the night, I think she’s fine for now.”

Dark amusement flooded back along the line. “I’m never gonna forgive you for not gettin’ pictures of that, love.”

“No way I was going in there.”

“Yeah, I s’pose that’d be asking a lot of your tender human sensibilities…”

“Oh, shut up.” Buffy sighed “Now I just have to jam ‘em back into your car and convince his ex-friends to help us figure out how to do an exorcism on her or some damn thing to help her without dusting her, and then…”

“Only if it looks to work, Buffy,” Spike answered tightly. “There has to be a way for it to be assessed first, yeah?”

“I know. I know it’s just a theory.” She bit her lip slightly. If it didn’t work…

“Tell my git of a grandsire to do right by her for a bloody change, either-or.”

Buffy squared her shoulders, watching as Faith herded the two vampires back into the overheated, stuffy car from under the shade of the east-facing motel room. It was late afternoon by now, so they were out of direct sunlight. “You know it.” It was a good thing the motel they were in was really close to the AI office.

Spike’s voice turned anxious. “I should be there…”

“No,” Buffy answered immediately. “The whole thing would just make you nuts. Please. Hold down the fort for me?”

“Always.”

“Thank you.” She smiled, aware he could feel it, hear it on the line. “I love you.”

“Bloody hell. Love you, woman.”

“Okay.” She hung up fast, before she got all smooshy, and headed around the car to take up her position in the blistering-hot driver’s seat. “This is gonna kill us mostly-humans unless we crank open a wind-wing or something, so you two are gonna have to cuddle up and throw a blanket over you or something…”

Leaning over the low seat-back, Faith tossed a purloined sheet over their heads. “Make like ghosts.”

“Ooooh, nice little tent for us to hide our daddles…”

“Dru, this isn’t a game…”

“Wearing too many clothes, he is, naughty Daddy…”

Drusilla had never sounded so damned pleased with her unlife.

Shaking her head, Buffy put the car into drive. “Let’s get this over with before they end up naked back there.”

***

“Well, I certainly have no idea how one might manage such a thing. If you are indeed correct, and the source of Drusilla’s madness is that she in fact contains the essence of both the Slayer’s demon and that of a vampire, then it is of course no wonder that she would feel torn between two opposing forces. It would also very much explain her oracular abilities. However, I can in no way see how we might test that theory, much less…”

“How about you ship her off to the looney bin where she belongs?” Harmony called from the front room. 

“I beg your pardon?”

“Yeah, Harm, what the heck are you talking about?”

Harmony lifted on hand over her head and snapped her gum. Twiddled her pen around over her hair. “Tscha! Right! Like none of you have heard of Mosaic! It’s only, like, the most famous demons-only nuthouse on the entire west coast…” When they all blinked at her, she lifted her eyebrows and looked amazed. “Wow. I actually know something none of you do.” Straightening, she began to glow, unfolding like an orchid under a UV lamp. “How cool!”

“Harmony,” Wes began, half in warning and half plea. 

“Fine. Look. It’s all over the streets. You know, demon has mental health issues, or is losing his mind, or is just plain nuts, they can go to Mosaic. The docs there’ll snap you up, cart you off… I think they’re connected with your boys at Wolfram and Hart somehow. They do experiments to make the hybrid demons un-demony or whatever. You know, if they have a genetic disorder, or to figure out what happens when interbreeding screws ‘em up, or if they have a problem because of inbreeding, because a species only has so many people left to boink, or whatever, and they get all mutated from doing their sisters…”

“Ew,” Cordelia put in, disgusted.

“Ditto,” Buffy agreed.

“How come we never heard about this place?” Gunn demanded, sounding trapped between horrified and grateful.

“Ugh. Because you’re not a demon, duh!” Harmony shrugged vaguely and started painting her nails. “It’s somewhere out in, like, I dunno. Nevada. Wherever. All I know is, it’s supposed to cure demons of being demonic, somehow, which, I mean, count me out. I love being a vampire. So much better than my life before, even if I kind of miss my sister. A little. Sometimes.” She shot them all a pointed glare. “I’d love it more if I got to eat somebody yummy, like a nice stupid jock, instead of drinking this crappy pig blood, but since you’re all such whiners about that…”

Angel had his eyes shut, as if he were overwhelmed. “Harmony…” he broke in, sounding pained. 

“Okay, what now? God, you’re such a spoilsport. You wanted a place to take your old squeeze to de-demonify her, I gave you something. Jeez; you’re such a hardass! I don’t know why I ever came to you in the first place…”

Everyone at AI looked slightly uncomfortable at this. “Uh,” Buffy broke in, a little at a loss, “how long have you been working here, anyway, Harmony?”

“Since right before I left, wasn’t it?” Faith opined thoughtfully. “They used to use me to threaten her with good behavior.”

“Yeah, which, talk about glad you left. You’re really no fun at all. You’re even meaner than Buffy. God,” Harmony continued, and threw down her nail file. “It’s been  _ months  _ I’ve been stuck here _. _ I swear, if I don’t get an acting job soon I’ll scream. I mean, have you seen how they  _ dress _ here?”

“Hey!” Cordy exclaimed, stung.

“Okay, but you used to have style. You don’t anymore…”

“Look! You try having a look on a shoestring budget, then come to me…”

Buffy held up a hand to forestall a couture war. “Harmony, I need your phone for a sec.”

“Oh. Yeah. Sure. It’s not like anyone’s busting down the doors lately…” Surrendering her seat, the young vampire backed up to lean against the near wall. Buffy took the chair—one thing about sitting where vamps had been, the seat wasn’t warm—and glanced at the worn-looking rolodex sitting beside the message pad. “Uh, anyone have Wolfram and Hart’s number handy?”

“Buffy…” Angel began, sounding incredibly uncomfortable. “Do I have to remind you that I’m kind of at war with them…”

_ “We _ are kind of at war with them,” Cordelia broke in, sounding miffed.

“You can call Lilah Morgan,” Faith broke in calmly. “She’ll come down. Actually, let me, B. We have… kind of a simpatico.”

Buffy lifted her brows at her sister-Slayer. “A simpatico.”

Faith shrugged offhandedly. “She’s good in bed.”

“Oh my God, are you serious, right now?”

“What can I say? A girl comes to LA, a girl gets bored… A hot lawyer chick comes by and propositions you with a walk on the bad side, you turn the tables to distract her. Get the power back on your side. Job well done.”

“You…  _ What?” _ Angel sounded horrified. “With Lilah…”

“Damn, girl,” Gunn put in, sounding impressed. “Talk about walking a fine line.”

Buffy buried her face in one hand, momentarily at her wits’ end with Faith’s escapades. “Angel, you don’t get to talk. You just renewed acquaintances with your sire...”

“You slept with Lilah  _ Morgan?” _ Cordelia demanded… then came to a screeching halt. “Wait. Angel, you slept with  _ Darla?”  _

“Oh. My,” Wesley sighed. “This is bound to get ugly.”

Buffy lifted her head, shook it. “Alright. A, we’re not talking about Angel’s Darla issues right now. He also slept with Dru. It’s vampire family values night, okay? It happens. B, Faith, do you still have her number?”

Faith smiled that slinky smile she reserved for matters of sex. “Of course. You never know when you might want a no strings booty call from a skanky lawyer. Girl was inventive.”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Well, this is a business call. See if she knows what’s up with this Mosaic place.”

With a shrug, Faith tugged her phone out of her back pocket and dialed. Everyone else spent their time staring at Angel like he was a leper.

“Hey yourself,” Faith drawled after a sec. “Sorry. This is a business call. I’m here with Buffy… Yeah. You know I was. We’re here now, with Drusilla. We heard about this place called Mosaic… Oh. Huh. Well, could you come by for a little visit and chat about it? I’ll maybe make it worth your while later… Oh,  _ really _ .” Faith’s vowels lengthened to languorous. “Well, I’ll have to think about that. At length.”

Buffy was  _ really _ glad she couldn’t hear the other end of that conversation; doubly so when she saw Angel’s wince, the way Harmony rolled her eyes and Drusilla tittered and muttered something about dirty girls.

The call ended finally, Faith smirking as she folded the phone back into her pocket. “She’s on her way.” A little shrug. “Everyone, be nice. This is a favor to yours truly.”

“You ask a lot,” Cordy snarked, sounding hard. Her eyes on Angel glittered like agates.

Dang. A lot of hurt there.

“It’s not what you think…” Angel began, and there was a serious note of pleading in his voice, his eyes, trained only on Cordelia. “I… I hit rock-bottom…”

Cordy cut him off before he could get going. “I don’t wanna hear this.” 

A note of agony touched his tones, low and focused only on the very angry woman watching him like he was a live rattlesnake. “I didn’t lose my soul. That should tell you something…”

A hand flung sharply up, and his voice was sliced off as if with a knife. He hung his head, looking as despairing as Buffy had ever seen him, and wow. Cordelia really did have him trained. Buffy didn’t think she had ever seen Angel so desperate to please anyone. Certainly he had never seemed so… almost subservient. /Not when he was with _ me _ , for sure./ 

And that was when Buffy realized it. Whatever was happening here in LA, whatever entanglements Angel was trying to avoid with Dru, Darla, et al… it was all about staying in good with Cordelia. He loved her; and in a way that he had never loved anyone else. In that way where keeping her good opinion was everything to him. In that way where he wouldn’t try to change her; in that way where he would change  _ for _ her. /Oh, wow./ 

/You had to stake Darla. She was your sire, so of course you felt guilty, but you had to stake her, because she’d never be anything but evil… and she’d never love you when you weren’t. But she  _ made _ you, and the thought that you could actually  _ save _ her… So you sacrificed this thing with Cordy to get her back and save what she could be; a version of her who could be with who you are now. Sacrificed this thing you were building that satisfied everything you’d needed, everything you’d been missing since you lost your sire. You rolled the dice on a gamble… and instead you lost them both. Because you couldn’t save her. So of course you weren’t doing cartwheels up in that hotel./ 

Buffy closed her eyes. /In for a penny, right?/ She kept them shut as she spoke. “You know it’s not just that being with Darla didn’t make you happy, right Angel?”

Angel’s head swung around to stare at her, nonplussed. She didn’t even bother to return his gaze, though she felt his amazement. 

She had called someone else last night, after she had talked to Spike. She was pretty sure of her ground, now. “Willow didn’t know, back then. She was still pretty new to the magicks when she did your re-ensoulment, so she didn’t notice the difference. She would’ve if it was happening now. She’s a lot better a witch now than she was then. More educated, more powerful. She’d’ve  _ felt _ the difference, but she was like a total baby at it then, and just trusted that the spell Jenny wrote up was the same as the old one.” She opened her eyes then, to watch his reactions closely. “But it wasn’t, was it? Because otherwise you wouldn’t be acting the way you have been since you came here to LA. Locking people in rooms with Dru and Darla to snack on…” Reason one of three that she had asked Wil to look into the text of that old spell. That, and all the sex he was having of late, since Spike’s attestations or no, it was worth looking into. 

That, and… “Jenny realized that having that caveat in your curse was really a dumb idea. That it was really actually kind of bad for the world, that you could be turned loose again at the drop of a hat. So she went all rebel and changed it. Re-worded it. After all, her uncle was dead. He couldn’t stop her. It doesn’t have that little kink in the works anymore.” Buffy shrugged, trying for breezy. “I think maybe she did it so that we could be happy someday if we ever tried again, because she was sweet that way and kind of a romantic; but I think she also kind of figured that your not knowing about it would keep you behaving a certain way…” 

Everyone in the room was staring at her now. She did her best to ignore the compound weight of their gazes. “And also, it’s still a curse, so you still have that dragging on you. The loophole isn’t necessary to keep you in check.” Buffy kept her eyes on her ex, smiled faintly. “You’re all good, Angel. You knew that already, of course, that you weren’t a spelled eunuch. I mean, I think you could be perfectly happy with a strong woman who won’t take your guff, just as much as with a sweet virgin groomed to love you; just in a different way. Someone who knows and loves your past, your present, and gets your demon. Someone your demon loves enough to actually submit to, instead of wanting to rule everything.” She shook her head grimly. “That’s a big deal. God knows I know it. You haven’t had that since you were claimed by your sire; not even when she came back, right? Because that link was broken when you dusted her, and it was, what’s the word? Tenuous ever since the soul anyway, if I know vampires. Because the soul’s been in the way.” 

She dropped her voice, speaking now to the monster in him. She knew from vampires now, in a way she hadn’t a year, two years ago. “You miss it, don’t you, Angel? You’d have to, after a hundred years of being all alone. And I’m sorry for you. I really am. And I’m so glad for you, that you’ve found someone who fills that need.” She didn’t look at Cordelia, but she knew Angel knew who she was talking about. Neither of them were idiots. Not now that they both knew how it worked. “And I think you’re safe here, with this relationship. More than that; I think it gives you something both parts of you need, which is more than we had. The balance was way off, with us, whatever our demons told us.” 

For the first time, Buffy felt like she really got her ex, and wow, he was screwed up. “But freaking out so hard because it feels right that you self-sabotage it, because you’ve taught yourself to run from anything that feels good?” God, he was a masochistic idiot. “You’re not doing this because you’re afraid you’ll lose the soul if you give in. You’re just being kind of a dumbass; just like with us.” Buffy’s voice tautened with frustration. “I mean, did it ever occur to you, even once, either time, to look into anchoring the damn soul, or getting around the loophole somehow? Looking for some kind of cosmic prophylactic or something? I mean, jeez! Take some responsibility! It’s not just your happiness--or unhappiness--at stake here! There  _ are _ other people involved!”

Angel was staring at her in amazement and horror. She could feel Cordelia’s eyes on her back, shrewd and awed. Buffy shrugged, well-aware that even Cordy now knew exactly what she was talking about; that all three of them were locked in a very intimate conversation while the rest of the room gaped, and fine. So she’d blown their cover. So what. She knew all about loving from afar and wanting, but thinking it was wrong, all that tragic bullshit. Moreover, that that was exactly what it was. Bullshit. If you wanted something, you acted. You reached out and took it. You didn’t pussyfoot around for years, or you lost it, and it all went pear-shaped and sour, and sometimes you lost your chance. Someone got staked or killed or whatever, and how dumb was that? “There’s only so much time in the world we live in. You can’t afford to waste it,” she finished softly, and turned firmly to Cordelia. “Either of you.” When Cordy’s face hardened, she shrugged, letting it go. Not her circus. “He’s an idiot, I know. Believe me, I know. Up to you.”

Cordy’s cast of anger faded a little into thoughtfulness. 

It was enough. Nodding, Buffy turned back to Drusilla, who would have no problem sharing. It was the vampire way. She was used to sharing her Daddy with Darla. It would never remotely occur to a childe to expect to come first with her sire, so this would in no way particularly wound her, that Angel had found someone who, for the first time since his sire, spoke to the part of him who actually wished to bow to a strong woman rather than to dominate her. “Of course, there’s still the current situation to deal with. How are you feeling, Dru?” she asked, not unkindly. 

How Cordelia would deal with the Dru situation was, of course, a whole other ball of wax. She might not be that okay with vampire stuff. It was a serious learning curve, but again, definitely not her monkeys.

“Daddy’s always liked us. The ones who can See. And we have the Sight because we were Chosen. Have a calling, we do. Makes us sisters…” 

Buffy blinked at that, working through it, then… /Oh!/ Turning, she stared at Cordelia. /Could she really have been a Potential Slayer?/

“What, Buffy?” Cordy snapped, frustrated and obviously at the end of her rope.

“Nothing.” She had enough sass, for sure. And she was tough. And she had demonic visions now, and was handling them alright. And, she had grown up on the biggest hellmouth around, whereas Buffy had been a transplant.

Interesting.

“Have always shared Daddy. Can share him again. Long as I can keep him, know he wants to love me…”

The bell over the door rang softly, and a tall, leggy woman in a pencil skirt and shoulder-length brunette hair sidled into the ragtag offices, incisive eyes taking them all in. “Well. This is quite the committee.”

“Hey there,” Faith answered from where she leaned against the wall near the coffeemaker.

“Faith,” the woman answered, and lowered her lids in a sultry sort of way. Lilah Morgan, Buffy assumed.

Then the sultry look vanished, replaced with sharp awareness as she scanned the rest of the occupants. “I see they’ve brought you to heel, Angel.” Her eyes swept him up and down, and she smiled faintly. “They used Drusilla to do it, huh? Interesting tactic.”

“Go to hell, Lilah,” Angel bit off.

“Angel!” Buffy snapped, because negotiator he was not. “Sorry, he didn’t have any breakfast. We were fresh out of blood at the motel. Hi. I’m Buffy. I actually meant to get in touch with you guys a while back to see if it was possible to get documents for another member of the family, but things got crazy and I didn’t get the chance.”

“Spike,” Lilah answered, eying her up and down. “You were considering a legal commitment.”

Nice to know somebody over at WR&H was doing their homework. “Still am. If we can swing it. Whenever.” Buffy managed a nonchalant shrug. “I dunno if that’s a thing…”

Lilah matched her wariness with her own. “It’s happened. Usually just a cover story for some of our more… toothy citizens here in LA and Orange County, but it can be done. You should give us a call sometime.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

Lilah nodded, eyes skittering away from her to land on Drusilla. “I haven’t had the pleasure. Drusilla, I presume…”

“Your soul belongs to nasty, big high mucky-mucks. You’ll end up with no body, owned till the end of time, and when they leave they’ll take you with them, far, far away…”

Lilah’s lips twisted. “Pleasure.” Her eyes rose again to wash impartially over them all. “So. Why am I here?”

Buffy took point. “What do you know about Mosaic, the place in Nevada?”

Lilah froze. “It’s in Primm.” Her eyes jerked to Dru, lighted briefly, skipped away. “If you took her there, she’d never leave. The current… director, Mah Zinn, specializes in maintaining power over inmates, but he does so by implanting his spawn in their skulls to control them. He can cause them intense pain, even kill them on a whim. He doesn’t really help them so much as use them as hosts for his young.”

/Well… shit./ “So much for that.”

Angel’s face went hard. “Then he should be stopped. From what Harmony told us, word on the street is, part-demons go to this place hoping for help. They shouldn’t end up permanent residents who are used for this guy’s personal gain.”

Lilah sighed heavily. “There’s that do-gooder mentality of yours again. Angel, you wouldn’t beat him. You can’t get in unless you’re committed, and getting the spawn put in your head is part of the commitment process. Once that happens, you’re under Zinn’s control. There are some decent doctors in there who are actually trying to help, doctors who might actually be able to help your childe here, but you can’t get to them unless…”

Angel’s eyes shot to meet Wesley’s, hopeful and pleading. Wesley sighed heavily. “We’d have to find a way to get you out again, once you were in place, should anything go wrong.”

Angel stilled. His eyes touched Cordelia’s briefly. “I owe it to a lot of people to do this.”

There was a faint pause, and then the tight thing in Cordy’s eyes wavered slightly, and she nodded. And seemed to soften a little in his direction.

“You’re insane,” Lilah opined, staring at Angel in amazement, then shook her head. “It’s your funeral.”

Angel turned away and reached out, touched Dru’s face; a light caress with the backs of his fingers. “Do you See anything, Dru?”

“Daddy will hurt. He’s doing this so that my sweet William will not have to do it later, because Spike’s gone and changed the way he walks in the burning light, and Daddy’s changing the way he’ll walk into the dark. But Daddy will hurt, and hurt, and it will be such a pretty pain, all wrapped up in a gift for his baby girl…”

Angel winced. “Will it help?”

“Pretty presents, brought back for Miss Edith to wonder if she has a home...”

Buffy frowned, working through that one. She still wasn’t sure which one ‘Miss Edith’ was; the vamp-demon or the slayer-essence one. But ‘brought back’ sounded promising, so… “Will you and Miss Edith get help after this, Dru?”

“So many nice people to talk to us and ask us questions. Who is here when, how do we take turns, who is talking to us, dancing in the light and shadows, spinning, spinning, spinning…”

Definitely promising. Buffy’s eyes rose to meet Angel’s. It was up to him. It sounded like this would be a victory bought with a lot of agony on his part.

Angel sighed and shrugged. “I guess I’m driving to Primm.”

Cordelia turned around, moved to take a seat. It was the first time she’d unbent from her soldierly stance, frozen upright against the bookshelf. 

“Teach naughty Daddy a lesson, they will…”

Buffy bit her lip and caught the mazy vampire’s eye. “If we… stay in a motel nearby, do you think you’ll be able to tell us when he’s free of whatever they’ve put in him, and it’s safe to go meet him?” 

Dru twirled her bound wrists above her head. “Daddy will tell me…”

“She’ll feel it,” Angel confirmed grimly. “She’ll bring you both right up to the gates or whatever, and knock to be let in.”

Buffy didn’t really like it, but this was exactly the kind of self-sacrificial thing Angel liked to do anyway; a sort of ‘paying for my sins’, self-mortifying sitch. He’d feel better about recent events, apparently so would Cordelia, even if she didn’t necessarily want him to hurt, per se… and maybe after he’d expiated his recent sins a little, he might be welcomed back into the fold. Buffy could tell that that, at least, was his hope.

And to be fair, she honestly felt it kind of fitting that he was doing this, since it fell into the rubric of ‘taking responsibility’. Not that she wanted him to be in pain either, but if he was insisting on it, she wasn’t gonna stop him. He was a big boy, and she wouldn’t like it if he told her not to do what she’d set her mind to do. 

Instead, she’d do what she’d prefer him to do if their roles were reversed, and support him. So she nodded. “We’ll come with you. Be ready to help. Back you up.” And while he was still nodding she turned to Lilah Morgan, smiled faintly. Time to negotiate. “If I were to tell you that Spike and I have access to a certain amount of demon-derived wealth we needed to fence, and that we needed a lawyer who could expedite the paperwork we discussed… You’re a familiar face now. And since Faith can get in touch with you pretty quick, and I’d rather trust the devil I kind of know than some other random jerk over at Wolfram and Hart… I’m thinking I’d hire you first to handle all that.” She caught the look of interest as it kindled in the otherwise placid woman’s hard-eyed expression. “Would that mean that I could also hire you to draft something to help us try to get him out if things went south in there?”

Lilah’s lips flattened into a thin line. “I mostly work in Special Projects. But a relationship with the Sunnydale Slayer would be a nice notch on the headboard, along with the one I’ve developed with the LA Slayer…” Faith smirked faintly in acknowledgement. “So… let’s just say that’s worth something to me.” The lawyer studied her nails diffidently, shrugged. “I will say that it’d be tough. Mosaic’s an independent. They don’t accept outside interference. And since what they do isn’t really about functioning as a mental health facility, interfering with a sovereign individual’s spawning habits…” Off Buffy’s sharp glance, she uncrossed her arms and sighed. “I could maybe draft something about Angel’s usefulness to the Wolf, Ram, and Hart. It might carry some weight against the instincts of an entity like Zinn, and he might be willing to let go of one of his spawn’s hosts in exchange for certain research we have on the back burner. I’ll look into it.” Her eyes turned on Buffy, glittering. “You’d owe me, of course. Me,  _ personally _ ,” she asserted, with heavy inflection on that last.

Buffy nodded, calmly accepting. “I think we’ve already established that. I’d do a lot to take care of Dru. She’s… family.”

Lilah’s brows lifted. “That’s a big step just because you’re doing her childe.”

Buffy shook her head. “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

The lawyer’s eyes widened in amazed realization. “You  _ didn’t _ .”

Angel made a twisted sort of face from behind her. “She did. Which, believe me, we’re gonna have a  _ talk _ …”

“It’s  _ done _ , Angel. There’s nothing to discuss. And this is none of your business…”

“It is, if you’re gonna make a deal with her for my sake! Buffy, you have no idea who you’re talking to…”

“Shut up Angel. Nothing’s in writing. Ms. Morgan and I just have a… loose mutual understanding.”

Lilah’s eyes were dancing now as she assessed Buffy with something like awe. “Well, this is unprecedented. A Slayer, linked into the bloodline of Aurelius. And I’d have an in. That’s… hm. More of a coup than I’d anticipated. My, my, my. Well. This has been most enlightening…” 

“Jeez, Buffy; what did you  _ do?” _ Cordelia’s voice was sharp with curiosity from across the room.

Harmony’s went flat. “What, did you do some weird Slayer-y thing to Blondie-Bear? Because that would be so ew…”

“Oh,” Wes murmured, as if belatedly reaching understanding. “Dear God.”

/Yes, that’s right, welcome to realizing what a freak I am, the Slayer who got her freak on./ “None of your business, Wes…”

“Good Lord, does Mr. Giles know?”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Of  _ course _ he does! Jeez!”

Faith was chuckling again.

“Oh man, what did she do that’s got your panties in such a wad?” Gunn sounded fascinated. 

“I dunno what she did, but with the way everyone’s acting I’m not sure I wanna know.” Cordelia already sounded disgusted.

Lilah Morgan, on the other hand, seemed very pleased by all this stunned interplay. Her eyes flicked over to Angel, incisive and ready to get this show on the road. “You don’t have to wait, you know. I can offer a necro-tinted car…”

Buffy frowned. “Necro-tinted?”

Cool eyes returned to assess her some more. “Oh, haven’t you heard? It’s the newest thing. Protects vampires from the deadly rays. Comfiest way to travel, unlive, whatever. All our cars have them…”

/File that as maybe a good Christmas gift or something. Anniversary, birthday… For him for me, because talk about making it easier to drive the damn DeSoto!/ “How much…”

The lawyer eyed her with a faint quirk of the lips. “Depends on if you get the cheap film or the real stuff.”

“Huh.” Well, she could quiz the slinky woman about this necro-stuff later. “Sounds like a plan. Angel?”

Angel sighed heavily. “C’mon, Dru. I guess we’re going to Nevada.”

Buffy turned to a still-chortling Faith. “You in this, or are you staying?”

Faith shrugged and pushed away from the wall. “Beats hanging around here waiting for the phone to ring.” Her eyes slid over to Lilah Morgan’s, and she lifted a brow in invitation. “Be back in town soon. My number hasn’t changed.”

“I’ll remember that.” She held out a set of keys.

“Sweet.” Taking them up, Faith followed Buffy and the two vamps out onto the awning-shaded section of street where the lawyer’s fancy car awaited.

* * *   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
I'm firmly convinced, based on some of the... Well, let's call a spade a spade. The eye-fucking going on between Lilah and Faith on AtS, that that door was definitely open. Whether or not Faith ever walked through it is open to interpretation.  
  
Honestly... I just kind of wanna keep Lilah in play because I find her character interesting. And, I think she'd find working Buffy and Spike's situation to her advantage interesting. So we'll see where that goes.  
  
Me moving up the timing of the (semi-canonical comics) raid on Mosaic and giving away something that was eventually going to fall to Spike's heroism is a regrettable deal--especially giving it away to Angel--but on the other hand, I definitely don't mind him going through some pain. He likes being martyred, whereas Spike doesn't need to suffer any more pain in this series. And Spike has a lot of other things he needs to be doing instead.   
  
Besides; Angel owes this to Dru. Among a lot of other things. And it plays into a longer storyline. Eventually.  
Speaking of things Angel owes to Dru... is it bad that I find the idea of tying him down and leaving him at her mercy for a while just way too entertaining? Especially the more it wrecks his dignity and humiliates him?  
SO satisfying.


	37. Chapter 37

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seriously, though. For anyone who is reading both my Spuffy series, I SO did not expect these two stories to completely dovetail, timing-wise. It's honestly freaking me out. Even if the way I go about it is completely different, and the reasons I do what I do in each one is to come to different results in the end... because right now, in the beginning, they really do seem to be pointing toward the same solution for Dru. 
> 
> All I can say is they really, REALLY aren't. I swear. They're just enjoying a brief moment of mirroring because of the Mosaic plot-point. But it's just a waystation, in both fics; a stop along the road en route to two totally different resolutions for our poor, abused vampiress.
> 
> Also... other stuff happens, of course.  
> (If you're only reading the one, please ignore the foregoing rant, lol)

The Primm Valley was a fairly nice hotel; at least compared to the usual digs Buffy used to be able to afford back in her previous, broke incarnation. Now that she had an income, though, and was no longer the kept woman of the Watchers Council… 

Besides, it was there or that weird looking place across the highway; the one with the roller-coaster wrapped around it, Buffalo Bills or whatever. Which, ugh. Or, the one that looked like a really lame version of a castle, Whiskey Pete’s. At least the Primm looked like an actual hotel, and not a gigantic, oversized barn or a really sad attempt at dusty fairytale lameness.

The Primm used to be called the Primadonna, Buffy remembered, from a trip to Vegas once with her family back when she was a tiny kid, before that awful thing with that one kid who got molested in the bathroom (good enough reason to change the name of a place, she supposed). It was still fussy enough to be called by either name, though. It kind of looked like a cross between an old mission and a brightly-lit, tropical carnival. 

It also had super affordable rooms, at least compared to its hotel-casino compatriots further past Stateline, into Las Vegas. The room they got for themselves and Dru was only about thirty bucks a night plus a deposit, which heck, was less than that jerkoff had charged Buffy back in Sunnydale for that godawful motel with Spike. On top of that, this place was, like, clean and stuff. 

The décor also clearly appealed to their vampire roommate, what with the red walls, red satin coverlets, burgundy curtains, etc. “It’s also white underneath, Dru, so don’t get blood on anything,” Buffy warned the vampire, then frowned. “Dammit, the blood we brought for her’s definitely gone bad by now. Angel, you think you could…”

Angel sighed in a put-upon way. “I’ll make sure she’s fed before I leave.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Good Daddy, taking care of little Drusilla… Going to bring me a nice, plump, drunken reveler?”

Angel shook his head grimly. “I’m going to bring you whatever I can find from the kitchens, or maybe from their First Aid station.”

Dru pouted. “Bad Daddy.”

“You’ll survive.”

“Mean Daddy.”

“Well, them’s the breaks.”

“Fascinating relationship debates, we get to hear,” Faith put in as she sipped the approximately foot-and-a-half tall cocktail she’d grabbed from downstairs on the way in. No clue how she’d convinced the waiter guy to give it to her when she was underage, unless she had a truly convincing fake ID. Not that Buffy would put it past her. “You wanna hit the pool, B? We can take turns…”

Buffy nodded thoughtfully. Might as well make a working vay-cay out of it. “And maybe the sauna or the steam room…” Nevada was arid even by Cali standards. She glanced over at their pouting vampire ward. “Two-hour shifts?” They definitely had to keep an eye on their charge, or she was liable to make snacks of half the hotel, if only out of frustration.

“Deal.”

Angel made a face. “I’ll go get that blood. And then we can solidify the plan, and I guess I’ll go… check myself into this Mosaic place.”

Buffy nodded. “We’ll wait here.” Her butt buzzed. “Oh, dang.” It’d been way too long since she’d updated Spike. “Hey,” she answered the call softly, and ignored Angel’s sour look. “Sorry. Long day.”

‘What’s the latest, love?’

“We’re in Primm. Nevada. Angel’s gonna go to some place called Mosaic and try to trick the boss there into giving up or something, because the place is an asylum for demons, but right now he’s treating it like his own personal spawning grounds…”

‘What a git. How’s he do it?’

“Puts his babies in their heads to control them. It seems to be a theme around here lately.”

‘Common enough. Brains are tasty…’

/Hello nonchalant./ “Ew. What is this, a zombie movie?”

‘Lemme talk to Peaches.’

Buffy frowned. “Tell me how this is a good idea.”

‘C’mon, pet. Give over.’

Sighing, Buffy held out the phone. “Be civil.”

Frowning in his turn, Angel took the device, though he looked like he’d rather do anything else at the moment than speak to Spike. “What?”

She was still standing close enough to hear most of it. ‘You doin’ this for Dru, or just to be rid of her?’

Stung, Angel straightened. “I’m doing it ‘cause it’s the right thing to do! Not like you’d know about that, Spike, since you’ve never…”

‘Come off it, Peaches. Seems a lot of effort for a load of strangers. You really must want a place to put her so you can toddle off, now I’m not willing to take her on anymore, and Buffy’s laid down the law about staking her…’

Buffy frowned thoughtfully. Was this really what it was all about? Was Angel just doing this so he could dump Drusilla off and leave her there, and go on about his life without dealing with her? “Angel?” she prodded softly.

Dark eyes flitted to hers, away. “Buffy wants her assessed for this Slayer business. If these doctors here are really the experts…”

‘So long as you don’t abandon her again. And if they manage to cure her, Angelus, you’d best be there for her any road. She deserves it.’

Buffy straightened, firming up her resolve. “He will be,” she asserted, loud enough that she knew Spike would hear it over the line.

Angel flinched. 

‘Right, then. Put Dru on.’

Angel made a face. “Dru hates phones. You know that…”

‘Then bloody hold it for her, Peaches! Christ.’

The sour face going all the more pinched, Angel shuffled over to lean over the edge of the bed, and held the phone to Drusilla’s ear. 

‘Oi. Dru.’

“Hullo, my sweet. Mummy doesn’t like these little toys. Nasty buzzy things made of wires and plastic. They lie…”

‘I know, pet. Just wanted to see how you are.’

“Daddy’s being very cruel. He won’t let me hunt. Says he’s going to feed me leavings and scraps…”

‘Yeah, well… It’s the way when you’re gadding about with Slayers. Just sup and be glad, luv, and stay strong for Spike. Will you do it, Dru?’

She pouted some more, but sighed and nodded. “Taking your medicine without sugar when you’re bad, bad, bad…”

‘Right then. Good girl. Love you, pet.’

Dru sighed heavily, a wistful sound over the phone. “Not like you used to, rushing to me carrying bleeding hearts…”

‘Yeah, well…’ Spike trailed off. ‘It happens,’ he managed lamely.

Angel pulled up the phone once more. “I guess Buffy’ll update you, since you won’t feel anything from me anymore.” The last was said with no little snark, and with a hint of a sneer on his handsome face as his eyes flickered, accusingly, to hers.

Buffy rolled hers in response as Spike answered. ‘Bet that just drives you barmy, innit Peaches. But yeah. Slayer’ll keep me posted. Wish you luck, though. Put me back on with her, yeah? There’s a lad.’

Buffy hid a smile with firm discipline when Angel passed the phone back, looking thoroughly pissed off. Man, this was a thing, all these undercurrents. From the sound of it, Faith was fighting hard to bury her own mirth in her drink back there behind her as she took up the call. “Hey.”

Spike heard, or felt, her amusement, for his own voice absorbed and reflected her mood. ‘Thank you, Buffy,’ he murmured, though, and all mirth faded in lieu of a serious wallop of awe. 

“I care,” she answered softly. 

‘Yeah,’ he acknowledged, and now there was wonder in his voice. Wonder that she would care, just because he did. Because it affected him. ‘Bloody fuck, love. For this, I’ll live a thousand years and never touch another human being. That you care this much about her for my sake…’

“And her own,” Buffy reminded him. “She’s a part of me too. And I’m not asking you to do that, remember?”

She closed her eyes as the wave of emotion struck her; his amazement and wonder, his adoration, his overwhelming gratitude. ‘Christ, I love you, Buffy.’

“I know,” she answered softly. “Talk to you soon, okay?”

‘Yeah.’ He hung up, sounding shaken to his core.

Buffy closed the phone, slowly, and took a moment to breathe before she opened her eyes. His emotions remained inside her, which made it… a lot. “Alright. We’ll just… wait up here, Angel.”

Angel was watching her, his expression pained with the awareness that she could feel everything Spike felt. Then something agonized flashed through his eyes, followed by a faint, weary rage, and he nodded and, swinging around sharply, he stalked away toward the exit without a word.

The door slammed shut in his wake.

“Sour grapes,” Faith opined blandly. Her straw made that hollow noise that said she had hit bottom on her drink, which was seriously impressive.

“Daddy is very angry that Spike is all bound up in the Slayer. He likes his ripe, juicy plums to stay ready to be plucked. He doesn’t like it when they get eaten by others, juice dribbling all down their chins...”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “That’s just a gross analogy.”

“Oh, c’mon, B. I’m pretty sure your boy has spent plenty of time with…”

Swinging around, Buffy threw her phone at Faith. It hit her dead-center where a stake would a vamp, right in the chest. 

Faith cut off, laughing way too damned hard.

***

Angel took off after he got Dru and himself fed, looking something between anxious and set. Buffy touched his arm before he left, catching his attention. “Be careful.” She did care, after all.

Unfreezing a little, he nodded. “Yeah,” he answered, and with another quick glance at Dru and Faith, who’d given him a nod in return, he’d headed out the door, shoulders squared.

“We’ll break you out if you’re in there too long,” Faith called after him as the door swung shut, then turned to Buffy and lifted a brow. “Did you see it? They have Bonnie and Clyde’s getaway car downstairs. The one they died in. I wish they’d let us sit in it. Talk about wicked cool.”

“Okay, ew.”

“Love is dying in oceans of blood with your lover, madness swirling around you, laughing, laughing…”

“Okay, you two should  _ not _ have conversations.”

Faith sat back and crossed her legs. “Huh. I would’ve thought you’d dig the Bonnie and Clyde thing, now you’re with Blondie…”

Drusilla’s voice broke in, this time sounding almost sane. “The Slayer would prefer not to believe that her love is fated to burn,” she offered easily. “She would say that that madness ended when my Spike left me. Poor Spike... so lost.” Dru went all tearful and mopey. “Even I can't help him now.”

/Oh my God./ “Chill with the omens of disaster, Dru, will you? Spike’s not going to dust just ‘cause he’s with me.” With a heavy sigh, Buffy schooled herself to patience and moved closer, grabbed the drama-queen vampire’s flailing, pale hand. “I promise, I’ll do my best to keep him. You think I want him to die?”

Dru eyed her with something like clarity, lifting her head from her mazy tilt to stare with fascination. “It's so funny. I knew... long before he did. I knew he loved you. The pixies in my head whispered it to me…”

Buffy nodded. “I know. And I’m sorry…”

Vampira shook her head, tears filling her eyes. “I cut him and bit him and scratched him. I was so very angry… but I could not cut his heart away. It wasn’t mine anymore. And he never knew… I was doing it to save him. Because now he’s dust… He’s ashes…” There was a wail in her voice.

Buffy fought not to quail. “There has to be another way,” she whispered. “You have to see another path. A way around that. I won’t let that be the only answer.”

Bottle-green, crystal eyes looked through her, not clouded, like usual, with prophecy, but harsh with certitude. “Only one way, Slayer.”

“How?” Buffy fought not to shake the other woman, as if to rattle the answers loose. “You love him too. Tell me how to keep him with us.”

Drusilla eyed her like a striking snake. “When the end comes, and he fights to be your champion… you must stand in his place. He must go on, without you.” She shook her head grimly. “But he won’t want to. Not now you’re bound up. He’ll follow.” And the clouds slid back over her gaze. “Dust, always dust, it ends in dust and ashes…” She was wailing again, now.

/Oh. Oh, shit./ There would be some apocalypse, and one of them would have to die. And since they were claimed… “I’ll figure something out, Dru.”

“No,” Drusilla informed her flatly. “You won’t. The Slayer must die. The only way you won’t go is if you leave this world entire. No one can fight a god…” And her wails changed, abruptly, to laughter. “So many ways to die… You, and then, now, also my Spike, following right along; the Slayer falls down and breaks her crown, and William comes tumbling after…”

It was a very bleak picture. “You mean… she’s not gone.”

The peals of laughter continued without pause, except to turn mocking.

“Well, shit. You know what?” Faith muttered, and tossed aside her very tall and now very empty drink, “I think we need a break from prophecy. Damn, this knowing what’s about to happen majorly sucks. I’m not sure how your guy handled it for a hundred years.” And she marched away to the mini-fridge to poke at the offerings inside. 

Buffy knew that stuff was expensive. And, for the first time, she didn’t really blame Faith for considering more alcohol. Heck, she might join in sometime tonight.

***

They were at the Primm for three days and four nights, waiting. While trading off to do various activities here and there in the hotel-casino, seeking blood sources for their charge, and otherwise keeping busy, they got regular bulletins from Drusilla regarding Angel’s progress; largely in the form of spinning, dancing rhapsodies on his pretty pain and lovely agony. “Daddy’s hurting for me,” that sort of thing. But eventually Angel must have found a way to accomplish his goal, because finally on the fourth night she sat up, smiled, and looked rapturously out across the desert through their window. “Daddy’s free now,” she told them simply. “He can come back.”

“Well, alrighty then.” Faith, who had just come back from her shift at the pool, nodded at Buffy. “You wanna go down or stay up here?” 

Buffy, whose turn it was to chill for a while out of the stuffy confines of the room, shook her head. “Should we go to him, Dru, or wait?”

“We can go to him. Lovely maidens all in a row…”

“That sounds… worrying.”

What it turned out to be was a welcoming committee at Mosaic, comprised of about seven demons and part-demons chillin’ at the doorway to the center beneath the tall tower of the place, all waiting arm-in-arm with Angel for their arrival. There were two male demons who looked haggard and careworn… and a coterie of about five female ones, all kind of hanging all over him like he was a conquering hero. All of them were clearly wary of their Slayer visitors, but just as obviously Angel had prepped them for the incoming trio, because no one fled or anything. “So… the place should be safe now,” he told them wearily as they approached. 

“What happened in there?” Faith asked before Buffy could.

“The short version?” Angel swept his hand around him. “We staged a revolt. We had inside help from one of the therapists and a few others. Beck here threw some fire around before I could be disfigured…” A dark-haired girl with a big smile waved at them. “A few other vamps who didn’t want to go under the knife created a diversion—most of ‘em ended up dusted for their pains—I killed Mah Zinn, one of the patients who was a witch broke Ivo Shandor’s seal, and here we are.”

/Why does that name sound familiar. Ivo Shandor... Ivo.../ Buffy really felt like she should be able to place it, but she couldn't grab onto whatever it was, so she gave in, glanced over at Dru, whose eyes were glittering. “Sounds like you took a lot of losses.”

Angel looked bleak. “There were a few casualties. But the new director is going to clean the place up. Things’ll be better in there now.”

His voice was so tight. “Are you okay, Angel?”

Dark eyes landed on hers briefly, flitted away. “I’ll live.”

It had been tough, then. 

The place was, of course, in upheaval. The therapists and such, however, were working hard to get the asylum back in working order, and struggling with the concept of a new system. Most of them seemed more than willing to actually turn the place into a healing center as opposed to a harming one, and eager to do the jobs they’d been hired to do, and the new director, Malposo-something long and unpronounceable was more than willing to take on the interesting case of Drusilla the possibly-haunted vampire. “We’ve treated many vampires in the past, mostly due to difficult transitions from their human lives. This sounds a far more complex case. We can put your theory to the test right away with a simple trace spell, of course…” 

Drusilla drew back, looking suspicious. “Nasty spells, touching my brain with filthy fingers…”

/And now we know where Spike’s anti-magicks prejudice came from./ “This won’t hurt her, right? This spell?”

“No, it’s just a diagnostic tool.” The woman set out a book, a bowl with some water in it, some incense, a powder. She blew a puff of it into the bowl in a businesslike way, lit the incense, murmured something from the open book, stared into the bowl. Drusilla shivered and hissed.

“Well. Fascinating. Yes. Complex indeed.” Her eyes lifted to meet Dru’s over the witchy paraphernalia. “You, my dear, are understandably conflicted.” Her gaze slid over to touch first on Buffy, then on Faith. “Your Line is deeply fractured.” Her head tilted like a bird’s, eye glittering in fascination. “But… anchored, now. Truly anchored. It will help. If you bring the one who’s anchored it here, we might even be able to remove it from her without destroying her. Or perhaps, instead…” Malposo frowned, as if considering multiple, unspoken options, before shaking her head in dismissal. “But research. First, we’ll need to do some research, to be certain.” And the sharp gaze rose to catch on Angel. “You. You’ll need to come back often. You’re the progenitor of her blood. We’ll likely need to strengthen the part of her that’s vampire, if she’s to survive such a transition.”

“Right,” Angel agreed, sounding uncomfortable. “Would I have to be here at the same time as Spike?”

Buffy dug an elbow into his side. /Don’t be a big baby, Angel./

The Malposo woman blinked at him. “The anchor is named Spike?”

“He’ll do it,” Buffy assured her.

“Very well. We’ll admit her.” She turned back to Dru. “Come, my dear. We’ll find you a room of your own…”

Dru looked up at Angel, uncertain and anxious. “Daddy?”

“It’s okay, Dru. I’ll come every week to see you. These people are gonna help you find out a way to make it quiet inside your head.”

She sobered. “That would be nice,” she murmured softly. “Stop all the fighting with gnashing teeth…”

“I rather think it would be,” the director answered, and led the way out of the office.

Buffy was on the phone a little later with Spike, updating him from the lobby. He wasn’t telling her something, kept turning the conversation back to her and Dru. ‘It’s nothing, pet; nothing we can’t handle. I’ll tell you when you get home. Nothing so important as what you’ve been doing…’

Faith was also on the phone, with Graham. “Yeah. I’ll… I dunno. Maybe I’ll come back with Buffy. Not sure. I might stay here in LA for a while. They’ve got a lot going on down here…”

/Eee./ She was running. 

Buffy resolved to talk to Faith about that before too much time passed. But first, Angel. 

The drive back to LA was fraught; a touchy counterpoint to the relatively cool air of the fancy, air-conditioned ride. “You sure you’re alright, Angel? It sounds like you really went through some stuff in there.”

Angel remained stoic, of course. “It’s alright, Buffy. Whatever happened in there, I deserved all of it. And besides; it all came out alright in the end.” He was clutching a small, wooden box in his hands, had done so since they’d left Mosaic. “I had an epiphany back in LA. I know what I’m doing now. I’m good. You don’t have to worry that I’m gonna… go off again or anything.” And he flickered a faint quarter of a sheepish smile at her. 

Faith grunted from the driver’s seat, sounding unconvinced.

The miles scrolled by. And Buffy had to ask. “Angel, did you really do this for Dru, or because you just wanted her off your hands?”

He looked away, through the necro-tinted glass, out over the long desert horizon. “I did it because if nothing that we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do.” He turned the small box over in his hands. “And… I guess how we do it.”

/Well, wow./ She supposed he’d had an epiphany, after all. /Maybe you’re not just out for personal redemption anymore./ “That’s kind of profound.”

“I hope so. It’s my new motto.”

“Well, good.” Reaching up over the back of the passenger seat, Buffy kissed his cheek. “Hang onto it. You might even win Cordelia back.”

Angel started, and then his shoulders hunched away from her and he visibly flinched, looking a little hopeless. “I really kinda doubt it,” he murmured tonelessly.

Buffy shook her head at him, because he was kind of a moron sometimes. “Buy her nice clothes, you idiot. Take her out. It sounds like she hasn’t had nice things for a really long time.”

Chocolate eyes darted up to meet hers. “I…” He seemed uncertain discussing such things with her, which was laughable, considering.

“Oh my God; treat the girl, Angel, if you wanna get anywhere. It’s  _ Cordelia _ . Show her a good time. We all have our thing. Mine is to be an equal partner. Spike figured that out right away. Dru’s is to make her feel taken care of, if in ways I really don’t want to think about. Cordy’s is to pamper her and make her feel like the queen she is. So do that. Jeez; you’d think you couldn’t read the women you’re around, except…” 

Faith made a hardcore scoffing noise. Catching the gist, Buffy narrowed her eyes at him. “You were kind of hit and miss with me, so maybe you can’t.”

He frowned down at his box, looking kind of thrown. “Partnership?  _ That’s _ what you wanted?”

Buffy rolled her eyes at him. “Wow, Angel. Go. Go buy her a nice dress and take her for lobster. Deal with watching her eat. Let her watch you eat and get over yourself…”

“I, uh, already… I mean, she’s…”

“Huh.” Buffy absorbed that and nodded slowly. “Well, then you’ve already progressed to way past where we ever got to, with her. I think you’re way more comfortable with her than you ever were with me. But then, we were more performing for each than being real people, so that’s fair.” Off his stare, “The truth hurts, Angel, but that’s real. Go get the girl, before she gets away. She needs you. And obviously you need her.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Okay.” A faint, anxious look. “You’re not mad that I…”

She favored him with a pointed, ironic look. 

He went back to sheepish. “Right.”

“Just don’t lose sight of the fact that you’re still responsible for Drusilla, or I’ll have to come down here and beat some sense into you.”

“If I don’t do it first,” Faith put in bluntly. “That girl’s a wicked mess. What the hell, Angel.”

Another heavy sigh from the backseat. “Yeah. Right. Of course.” He was wearing that twisted expression again, but he also sounded resigned.

“Okay then.”

That settled, Buffy turned back to Faith. “Alright, so now on to you, Faith. What’s the deal with Graham?”

Faith jerked her eyes from the road, clearly startled. “What about him?”

“You’re hiding,” Buffy laid it out bluntly. “He’s got you running scared.”

Faith’s expression flattened out. “Drop it, B.”

“Nope.” She leaned back in her seat and stretched out her legs. “We’ve got thirty more miles before we even get to Barstow. Spill.”

Faith went into automatic hard-chick mode. “I’m not into this girl-talk bullshit and you know it.”

“Too bad. What’s the problem? He take you out to dinner one too many times?” Buffy grinned, ready to needle her sister-Slayer. “My thing’s partnership. Yours is toughness and pride, but also loyalty. He’s got you figured out and he’s ready to stick with you when you try to kick him out of bed, and it’s freaking you out.”

“Fuck off, B.”

/Oooh, scary comeback./ She was really kind of sunk on this guy, wasn’t she? “Is it because you’re scared you can’t trust him to hang around, or because you’re scared you  _ can?” _

“Fuck.  _ Off _ .”

/Damn. Bullseye./ Buffy grinned broadly at her tough-on-the-surface friend. “He got to you, didn’t he? You want to keep him, and it’s scaring you shitless.”

Faith’s lips turned to an invisible line, and her knuckles went white on the steering wheel.

“Fine. I’ll make encouraging noises at him when I go back.” It was a threat, and she knew it; an ‘I’ll handle your business for you if you don’t’. It was the kind of challenge someone like Faith couldn’t take lying down. “You can stay here for a while and screw miss tight-skirt lawyer chick. When you start to miss him, you’ll wander back. Or, we’ll have a crisis and need you for god-fighting or something, if Dru’s right and the bitch shows up again, because we know you want to have a crack at her and never got one. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that crap…”

“B, I swear to God…” Faith was sounding really ragged now, around the edges of all the tough.

Obviously Angel could hear it just as easily as Buffy could. “Wow, who’s this guy who’s got you so riled up, Faith?”

“None of your damn business, Angel!” she snapped, fierce in the low, filtered light. 

“Huh. He must be something special.”

“He’s not. He’s just a soldier I picked up for a little afternoon delight. He won’t stop hanging around…”

“He’s pretty talented in a lot of areas. I think Faith’s actually  _ fond _ .” Buffy was going for the gut. It was time. 

“I  _ will _ get out and walk, B.” 

/In this heat?/ But a cornered Faith was a dangerous Faith. Time to slow down a little, get candid. “No you won’t,” Buffy answered softly, “because you know I’m right.”

Fierce, burning eyes skewered her. “Don’t push me.”

Buffy sighed and sat back in the stream of cool air from the window; which, by the way, they really needed to get air conditioning for the DeSoto. “Sooner or later you’re gonna have to face him,” she pointed out sadly.

Faith sat still for a moment, tense and practically soldered to the steering wheel, then she sagged and bit her lip. “Fuck.”

“Sooner or later it gets real with somebody.”

It exploded from her. An admission. “This fucking sucks.”

/Win./ “Welcome to letting someone get under your skin. It’s scary as hell.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

Buffy smirked cheerily at her sister all the way back to LA. 

Faith was really not happy with her about it.

***

“Well… I guess we’ll see you next time you decide to check in?”

Buffy smiled at Cordelia’s equivocal tones. It was obvious that her old schoolmate half didn’t want to see her again, but half expected to and was prepared to deal with it if necessary. “If you tell me Angel’s holding up his end of the deal with Dru, I won’t have to invade.” And she shot her ex a pointed look.

His hands lifted immediately in surrender. “I’ll visit her,” he protested. “Every week. Stateline’s not that far.”

“Yeah,” Cordy muttered, “and then she’ll be dragging you around the corners in that place to try to screw you, Elvira-style…”

/Oh, dang./ “It’s a vamp thing,” Buffy murmured, and blew out a sigh. If it were her, and Spike and Dru were still…

Yeah, she would definitely not be okay with it. Like, if Spike had run off with Dru to go be a free vampire again, she would have gotten over the feeding part a lot faster than she would have the fucking part, which probably said bad things about her ethics, but… /But, there’s figuring out ways to do mental gymnastics over stuff that’s part of someone’s instinctive nature and are also part of survival—like eating—and then there’s the parts of someone’s instinctive nature that are just about hedonism, and could definitely make you feel like dying inside./ 

/Damn./ “Maybe they can negotiate a way for Dru to feel cared for without that part, though. As long as she thinks her Daddy gives a damn about her…” Buffy lifted a pointed eyebrow in Angel’s direction. “And who knows. If her treatment helps, and she gets a little more sane…”

Angel looked doubtful. But then, that was kind of his fallback position. “It’s on you, Angel,” Buffy pointed out firmly, because he didn’t get any wiggle-room on this. “You have a link with her. You can send her warm-fuzzies. If you make it real enough, she might actually believe it and be less needy. She might not even be so grabby; especially if the therapy works.”

He frowned, lifted his eyes to her, filled with irritated accusation. “Yeah, because warm-fuzzies are so popular with soulless…”

Okay, just no. “You don’t get to make any assumptions.  _ None _ . You never really knew him. You never really knew what he actually wanted, and never got, because your nest was  _ not _ a friendly place. You people never just sat around and touched, did you? You were all, ‘let’s hurt each other for the fun of it’…”

He winced. “Buffy, we were soulless  _ vampires _ …”

“As if you’re the official spokesperson for vampire-ness.” Buffy narrowed her eyes at him, awareness striking her head-on. /We always took your word as law, and you as some kind of paragon of vamp-example-ness, but you’re really kind of a weirdo./ “You had a rep even then as the worst of the worst… and then you got a curse slapped on you. You were never the average vamp. I’m not sure why you tried to convince us you knew how the average vampire even works.”

Angel jerked away from her as if she’d slapped him. “Buffy, what are you…”

Buffy shrugged it off, trying for blasé. “I’m just saying, I think I’ve learned more in the last year and change that’s more accurate, than I ever did when we were dating. Plus…” She smiled sweetly. “I get immediate confirmation, direct from the source, nowadays, which helps.”

He frowned, instant and censorious. “Buffy, why did you do it?” he demanded, beetle-browed and offended. “You have to know that everything you think you ‘know’ is biased! That…”

“Just like it was before?” she pointed out, still sweetly.

“Wait,” Cordelia put in, straightening. “Before… when you were with her? Buffy, tell me what you’re talking about.” It wasn’t a request.

Buffy turned to her sometime high school rival; a girl with whom she shared a great deal now, and would like to think of as a friend. It might poison things between these two for her to know the truth, but Cordelia deserved to begin from a place of full disclosure. And right now, where they were at—which was rock-bottom—Angel could begin from honesty, work his way back up. It was better than there being a time-bomb waiting to screw them up later on, when things were going well. “He put a blood-claim on me when he bit me that time. It was why I couldn’t get over him, and vice-versa...” Off Cordy’s shocked gasp, her fleeting glare of accusation, “I’m pretty sure it was instinctive, not something he thought through or anything—I mean, at the time, he wasn’t exactly in his right mind—but there it is.”

She’d need to know it was gone, of course. That that whole thing was over, now, and Angel was free and clear. “I broke it when he came back to confront me about getting with Spike. Now I have Spike claimed as mine, and a little while back I let Spike claim me in turn, which means he and I have a closed claim. It removes Spike from his family blood-ties and stuff, and that means Angel and Dru can’t order him around anymore or anything like that. Which totally pisses Angel off, because he never thought I’d do something like that, and it screws with his nest hierarchy.” She kept her eyes on Angel as she said it, shrugged slightly. “But his family is already pretty much in shreds, and he doesn’t own Spike anymore. And he never owned me, since I never actually consented to that bond we had before, so he doesn’t get to say anything about it.” Message received?

Yep, message very much received, considering the way Angel was looking away from her, all stymied and teed-off-looking.

Cordelia’s voice was very, very pointed when she spoke next. “Angel?” It was a, ‘tell me this isn’t true?’, a ‘you better explain yourself right now, buster’, kind of tone.

Angel stilled to stone. When he spoke, he did so extremely carefully. “It was… instinctive. And it’s over. Buffy and Spike can do whatever the hell they want to do. I just think she’s being reckless. I know Spike, and I’m worried about how this’ll end up; that she’ll end up getting hurt. But she’s right. It’s not my problem anymore. I can’t control Spike; not now. So…” He sighed, turned to Cordelia, eyes pleading on hers. “There’s a lot… A lot of things, vampire things, things that can happen sometimes that we have to learn to control… Things I never learned to because I never had to try. I’m still learning…”

“Well,” Cordy answered, and her tones were firm, uncompromising, “it sounds like we’d better get on you learning those things ASAP, mister.”

Something about her phrasis or her tone, if forbidding, must have sent him a message he had been praying for, because instead of folding in on himself, he expanded infinitesimally. “Yeah,” he answered, and a little smile touched the corners of his mouth. His eyes started to glow. “Yeah. I’ll get right on that.”

“Good,” she answered, and dropped her arms. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I need some coffee. And then I need a ride home, before Dennis has a conniption, worrying about me. Angel?”

He bloomed like a night-opening flower. “I’ll grab your keys.”

Buffy hid a smile behind her hand. They were going to be alright.

***

“…And then the ruddy bitch picked me up and threw me across the sodding car park…”

Buffy blinked, arrested in the midst of her single-minded quest to remove his duster. She was not quite capable of holding that image in her head. “How big was she?”

He caught her hands, kissed her fingers. “‘Bout your size, love, if that. Smelled like a normal girl, sort of.” He released her hands, and she tossed the duster aside while he frowned in thought. “Maybe faintly off. Not quite human, a bit like she’d been in a computer lab, or worked in one of those plastics-extruding places. Took me a minute to realize she was a sodding robot…”

Buffy flinched involuntarily as she returned her hands to his neck and jaw. Android-robot-things brought back very uncomfortable memories. “Go on,” she prodded tightly, and traced her mark on his throat with silent fingers. To do so was a calming meditation, after all.

He paused for a moment, shivering. She felt his cock jump against her, ‘heard’ his struggle to retain sensical verbiage. “Ah… So I went a few rounds with her.” A note of frustration entered his voice. “Mostly it was just me gettin’ pitched all over the bloody place like a soddin’ cricket ball, while she never broke a sweat.” He cleared his throat. “Then she vanished. Just marched off toward the residence halls; said she had to find this prick Warren. So, ah, Red got on the computer and tried to find a bloke by that name who went to your school. Guess it turned out to be a lucky break I was there to give the chits a ride. Red found him; seems he’d attended a satellite school over in Dutton. Some tech college.” Blue eyes opened on hers, slightly clouded by growing lust, but determined to get through the update intact. “Kinda confirmed the robot theory, yeah?”

She desisted briefly in her caresses, taken aback. /God, I leave town for a couple of days, and…/

Spike shrugged it off, thumbed her chin, his expression going a bit dark. “Soldier-boy got wind of it and came with me to check it out. This bloke Mears—that’s his surname—was stayin’ at his family’s home here in town. Miller used his Army ID to discuss the business with some chit there as was datin’ him, made up some story about how Mears was doing research for the Federal Government; experimental shite.” His eyes went briefly distant as he recounted the events of the past couple of days. “The chit was a bit brassed that Mears hadn’t told her about his so-called Army contacts, but soldier-boy made it clear Mears had to keep his mouth shut. Top-secret an’ all that bollocks, and he hustled Mears away; called some MPs and had the idjit dragged off to the base along with his mad robot.”

/Oh, wow…/ Not the outcome Buffy would exactly prefer, but…

“Probably along about now he’s being given a parade for coming up with tech like that all on his lonesome.” Spike looked sour. “In five years the soddin’ military’ll have robot supersoldiers. No doubt the prick’ll be lauded for saving lives by the thousands, when all he really wanted the entire time was to have a girlfriend who never talked back, and let him shag her whenever he wanted to without complaining. Useless tosser.” 

Derision dripped from his voice, and his eyes came back to skewer hers, dark with irritation. “Worst bit, Buffy? He’d had everything he’d wanted. He’d programmed the robot chit to do everything he asked… and he was bored of her. He’d just left her alone in his apartment in Dutton to run down her batteries while he scarpered off back home to Sunnyhell to date a real woman, because he realized he didn’t want a Stepford android. The poor thing had no idea what she’d done wrong. All she wanted to do was to please, because she had no free will of her own.” He shook his head grimly. “Was disgustin’. Like when vamps make slaves of humans they’ve thralled. Nothin’ real there. No challenge. No personality.” His eyes settled on hers, still dark, but for a different reason now, and he grinned faintly. “Give me a good, clean fight anytime. You could end up on your back or dust, but at least you know if you get your cock wet at the end, you’ve soddin’ earned it.”

Buffy rolled her eyes, abruptly something between offended and just, whatever. He was so predictable in his enthusiasms. “You’re gross, but at least you’re honest.”

“I’m blunt.” Cool hands caught her roughly around her waist. “I’ve no use for small-minded, pencil-dicked blokes like that one. Sod had a clear inferiority complex about women, needed to put ‘em down to prove he was a ‘real man’. Me?” He grinned cheerily at her. “Know for a fact women are the center of the bloody universe, and I’m a lucky sod to get to touch one such as you. But I also know when I’m valuable to a woman like you, it makes me one fine bastard, so I’ll proclaim it to the heavens and every other tosser I know if you’ll have me…” 

“Braggy McBraggerson…” Gosh, he was a keeper.

His grin broadened. “Missed you, Slayer.” He tugged her close by the hips; a rhythmic movement. “Want you.” His voice had turned husky in there somewhere.

She sighed and dragged him closer by his shoulders. “Well, lucky thing I missed you too.”

His mouth was already trailing up along her neck, under her ear, doing impossible-to-resist things. One hand slipped up to sink into her hair, tugged a little; just enough to get her blood racing. Her ponytail gave up the ghost, and her knees got a little weak. “Fuck, Buffy,” he whispered, desperate. “Why the bloody hell are we still dressed?” He was in game face, ferocious against her skin.

/ _ God _ ./ She dragged him hard against her. “Because that part is always impossible.”

They were going to end up with torn stuff again. Might as well get the party started.

She ripped his shirt.

_ “Fuck _ ,” he breathed, heavy in her ear, “I’m glad you’re a real woman.”

“Ditto…” she gasped back, his hands in motion everywhere, “that you’re… a real vampire…”

Her jacket was on top of the lamp. They were working on jeans, in tandem, and this was going to be one of those times they weren’t going to make it to naked. Oh well.  _ “Buffy…” _ he moaned against her.

“Shut up and bite me.”

“Fuck, I love you, Slayer.” The couch would have to do.

***

The grapevine informed them that things between Angel and Cordelia, and Angel and his former team, continued to heal. More importantly, Angel kept his promise to Drusilla, and visited faithfully every week. They got their reports from Faith at first, because she was a wimp, and stayed in LA for a couple of weeks to hide out from Graham while she dealt with her unwilling exposure to  _ feelings _ . But it turned out to be a good thing, since her being in the city kept Angel on his game with Dru and, apparently, also kept him honest about the Cordelia thing. Buffy got the feeling Faith needled him a lot about that sitch; at least, until Angel got tired of the other Slayer’s interference and started needling back about Graham, at which point Faith shut down and abandoned ship to come back to Sunnydale and deal with her situation. One of those things where you’d rather just face it than deal with the uncertainty anymore, probably.

Buffy had kind of prepped Graham for the weirdness, so he was ready to field Faith’s attempts to push him away, to run, to be a hardass, to pull out all the stops. Apparently it worked, and he didn’t let her get away with it, because when she came marching in on her determined, bleak-faced return, clearly set on ending things, he’d faced her down cool as a cucumber, invited her to step aside… and was still there the next day, while Faith looked all thrown and befuddled and totally out of her element. It was kind of awesome, actually. It was like she couldn’t figure out how to shake him, and he had all the weapons to counter her every move. She couldn’t hurt him enough to make him leave, and she didn’t want to leave herself, and so she was stuck.

They went back to a holding pattern, with Graham kind of just sitting back and waiting her out. It was like watching animals at the zoo.

In the meantime, still no sightings of their missing hellgod. Sunnydale basically went back to station-keeping. 

That was, until Ethan Rayne showed back up.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
So. Ivo Shandor... was some kind of weird inside joke for the guys who wrote "Spike: Asylum"... one Spike promptly laughed about and, tongue firmly in cheek, broke the fourth wall by reminding everyone who was reading that that was the architect who built the building-as-antenna in the original "Ghostbusters" film, to suck up all the supernatural energy in New York and open Zuul's doorway, yadda. So why not have him also magick a doorway no one can leave once they go in, to help some supernatural chucklehead to keep his prisoners intact?  
  
Also, it's a cool name, right?  
  
On another note... My grandmother and I used to go to Vegas all the time via Primm. We usually parked at Whiskey Pete's (the castle one), she used the arcade at Buffalo Bill's to dump off us underaged sorts (that roller-coaster has to be voted most likely to give you a spinal injury in the entire North American continent. It even has a sign at the entry that says, 'report any back injuries to the first aid station'. Whoever designed it did a really poor job with the transitions. I love coasters, but I will never ride that thing again), and ate at the Primadonna. The sad events there that made the owners change its name to the Primm Valley (some REALLY bad press in there) are best left unmentioned; to the point where Wikipedia just says it was about a change in ownership. Yeah. Bankruptcy will do that to a place.  
  
Moving on.  
It's a weird little place, Stateline. Excellent setting for a demonic asylum!  
  



	38. Chapter 38

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been awaiting the posting of this chapter with much glee, for an exceedingly long time (since approximately mid-August). It may not be for everyone, but it makes me stupidly happy, and heals something in me that's been broken since the first time I saw "A New Man", and especially since I heard what happened to Ethan Rayne in comics canon. 
> 
> It also leads to an arc that I find hugely satisfying, which then leads into another main-plot arc that is really kind of a neat...
> 
> Actually, you know what? I should shut up now.
> 
> (Many thanks, as ever, to wolf_shadoe, for helping me to figure out things like where to break up chapters. This one and the next were a hell of a trial to figure out when it came to stuff like that, so THANK YOU WOLF_SHADOE!!!)

Things were stupidly quiet for a while. It was kind of freaksome. And, everyone seemed to be taking advantage of the relative hellmouth quiet to enjoy themselves. Which, on the hellmouth translated, apparently, to banging like bunnies. At least, that was what was happening this week. 

Spike hadn’t let Buffy out of bed in two days except to pee and maybe, very occasionally, to stuff something food-like into her mouth here and there. Not that that was incredibly unusual, but what was unusual was that she wasn’t the only one. Mom was gone; off at the mysterious Brian’s place for the last couple of days. Which was odd behavior for mom-type people, especially when it came to irresponsible stuff like not-opening the gallery. 

Buffy maybe thought the incredibly money-driven Anya would’ve done it for her, except that if there was one thing that drove Anya more than money, it was sex, and the last thing Anya had said in their hearing before Spike had scooped Buffy up and dragged her off to lock her in her bedroom at Revello for the last forty-eight hours straight was that she intended to tie Xander up in his apartment and have her way with him for the foreseeable future. Which, let's be real, you couldn’t really do and also mind the shop.

Also, as they had been on their way out the door, Wil and Tara had looked similarly whisper-y and canoodle-y. And Buffy should probably be worried that this meant that they were really not paying any attention at all to Dawn, and that her little sister had been fending for herself for two days, but she couldn’t seem to drag herself out of the disaster of the bed long enough to do even one tiny thing about it. Weirdly, she felt guilty only when she was in the bathroom, which usually lasted about five minutes before Spike chased after her and either had his way with her in the shower or dragged her back into the bedroom to show her the error of her ways. At which point she totally forgot why she had ever left, much less mundane concerns like older-sibling-guilt. 

“Are you two ever gonna come out of there? Because this is just getting dumb; and by the way, you’re scarring me for life. Just so you know. Also, I’m running out of cereal. Not that it matters, since I’m also out of milk. If I starve to death, it’s so completely your fault.” The strident tones of disgruntled teenage irritation, muffled as they were by the closed door, broke through Buffy’s meditations, lost in the perfect rhythm of Spike’s body rolling with her on the tides of some sort of endless, perfect ocean of pleasure that seemed to go on forever. 

“We’ll run out and get her something in a mo’,” Spike groaned, and shuddered up into Buffy’s body, then rolled to pin her, driving her deep; and it didn’t seem possible, but she was actually  _ sore _ . When did that ever happen? But it was a good kind of sore, and god, he should never,  _ ever _ stop. 

“Hello! Starving out here! Actual dependent person!”

Spike moaned in desperation, face buried in Buffy’s neck. Buffy bit her lip, forced out words. “We’ll… get you… something. Soon.” /Oh. My.  _ God _ ./

The voice at the door took on a horror-stricken cast. “Scarred. For. Life.” 

Spike’s face emerged from Buffy’s neck, and his voice went all labored. “My jeans are hanging from the banister downstairs, Niblet. There’s a wallet full of cash. Order a pizza.” His eyes met Buffy’s, strained. “Fuuuuck…” he whispered, and his hips snapped faster. 

“You’re serious. You’re giving me your wallet.”

He didn’t answer, lost once more in what he was doing. Buffy, for her part, couldn’t really even process what she was hearing anymore.

“Okaaaay…” Footsteps retreated down the hall, and oh, thank god.

“This… isn’t… normal…” Buffy managed as he thrust, and she met him, desperate to finish whatever they were building, had been building, for days.

“I know it pet, but…” He might actually be sweating, which she would have said two days ago was impossible.

She bit his neck; not enough to draw blood, but enough to bring him to her; to join them. “What’s… ohgod…  _ happening _ , Spike?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care. Bloody  _ fuck _ , love…”

“I  _ know _ …”

There was a little lull after every orgasm. It gave her a tiny bit of a breather; just a brief moment’s clearheadedness to recognize other priorities. Buffy was able to sit up, shake her head, press the heel of her hand to her temple, still gasping. To note distantly that she was starving, blink at her exhausted vampire where he lay, spread-eagled and skimmed with damp on sheets that would never be the same. “Spike. We need to do something. This isn’t  _ normal _ . Even for us.”

His hand reached out, caressed her hip. “We’re not normal, pet. You and me, we’re randy bloody monsters. C’mere, love…”

“Spike, I’m serious. Stick with me for just one more minute! We’ve had sex for so long I’m actually  _ chafed! _ When does that ever happen?”

He drew the finger lazily up her side, trailed it around the outside edge of her breast. “If you’re sore, I can just love you insensible with my tongue. You know you love it when I…”

She had to fight against the shivery need to fall right back into the… whatever it was. She could just…

It was like feeling a steel trap closing on her brain, only heavy and soft and sexy and any second, if she didn’t hold it open with all her might, she would fall in and it would close around her and leave her lost in a hot, wet, sticky pool of… 

/Oh my god, we’re under a spell or something./ 

She did what she had to do. She shoved hard against… whatever it was, with all she had… and jumped away. Away from Spike’s scintillatingly alluring touch. Out of the bed. Across the room. Backed up against the closet door, huddled away from him in the far corner, by the window. “Spike, I need you to listen, for just one second, because this is like lifting a thousand-pound weight with my brain, and if you’re not with me I’m gonna drop it, and it’ll be another two hours before I can get clear again.” Everything in her, every corpuscle of her being was dragging her back toward him, every cell of her brain screaming at her to make a flying leap back into that probably at this point soggy bed and literally jam herself back down on his cock, drag her nails down on his shoulders, drag his fangs into her shoulder, ride him into oblivion…

/This is a spell. It’s a _spell,_ it’s  _ got _ to be…/ Not that any of that sounded in any way unwanted, but obviously there was more going on here than… 

“Buffy, c’mon, love, I bloody well want you, and…”

It dragged at her with the power of an electromagnet. Like one of those particle accelerators you read about in the news. It was like the very core of her was pulling her toward him, and she shook all over as she clung to the knob of the closet door, to the edge of her dresser. “Spike,” she whispered. “Something’s wrong. Listen…”

“…You want me…”

Her eyes fell closed. “Of  _ course _ I do,” she answered, trembling from head to toe with the need to fling herself on him. “I _always_ want you. But this is something outside us, driving us. I need you to  _ hear _ me. Something’s going on. We’ve been screwing for forty-eight hours straight. I’ve barely eaten. You haven’t eaten at all. We’re ignoring Dawn completely. Mom’s been gone. I think… I think this is affecting her, and maybe the rest of the Scoobies too. And yeah, it’s normal for us to have sexfests, but this is a little out of control. We can’t even stop long enough to  _ talk _ . I can barely think. You’re not thinking at all, and you’re Mr. Big-Brain. This is something hellmouthy.”

Spike stared at her briefly, then guffawed. “I follow my blood, pet, which doesn’t exactly flow in the direction of my head. And you… You’re so bloody delectable… You expect me to  _ think _ when you’re standing about looking and smellin’ like _that?”_ Pushing up from the bed, he began to stalk toward her, his expression lascivious and intent.

It was gonna take a command. She hated that she was going to have to do this to him, but…

/Or…/ There was one other thing she could try, first. 

She bit her lip as he neared. “Beetlejuice.”

He halted, stock-still. Stared in amazement. Shook his head. And it was as if something cleared in his eyes, very, very briefly. “Buffy…”

“Just for long enough to get you to listen.”

He shook his head again, and his left hand flew up to his temple. He blinked. Made a weird, twisted face, almost like he was being zapped with the chip again... then frowned. “Christ, it’s like somethin’ wants me to ignore every word you’re sayin’ and take you whether you want it or not.” He backed up a step then, his expression starting a slow slide into horror. “Bloody hell, Buffy, what the fuck is going  _ on?” _

She shook her head back in answer. “I don’t  _ know _ .” She lifted the edge of the nearer curtain slightly to peer out, uncertain even what time of day it was. Outside, the sun was going down. “I think it’s about seven. We should go find the girls. See if they can do some kind of tracing spell, figure out if this is a curse, or…”

Spike’s hand dropped down onto the curving metal foot of the bed, clenched hard enough to whiten even vampire knuckles. “Fuck, pet, I dunno if I can keep my hands off you long enough to make it all the way to the sodding campus.”

She knew. “I  _ know _ .” It didn’t matter how hungry, or sore, or tacky she was. None of it mattered. It was still literally everything she could do to keep off of him right now. She was vibrating with it. “Maybe we should go separately?”

“Shit.”

“Or…” She shook her head viciously to clear it. “Maybe I’ll go to the dorms, while you go see if Giles…”

The strain on his face was real. “Need a bloody shower first before I go anywhere. Christ.” 

She nodded agreement. “Me too, but…” God, just getting around him without jumping on him was going to be near-impossible, much less…

He stared at her, his expression like that of a man yearning toward a full, dewy canteen after months lost in a desert. “Buffy, I think… you should go. Grab some togs and go first. Take the car. Wash at the dorm. I’ll…” He tightened his fist on the bed-frame.

Buffy bit her lip. “Go into the bathroom and shut the door, and I’ll…”

He nodded, cheekbones hollowing. “Right.” It came out as a gasp. He turned, dragged himself toward the door. The link between them felt like something was tearing; like a rubber band that had been left out in the sun too long and was kind of crusty. The kind you were worried might snap if you stretched it too far. “Shit, shit, shit, pet, this…”

“Just go,” she breathed, and it felt like dying to say it. “Whatever this is, it can’t really take us away from each other.” It was like pushing oxygen from her lungs to speak; so much so that she almost got a headache pronouncing the words, and she needed to leap on him, she needed to...

He made the door. Pulled it open. Forced himself through. 

God, it hurt. The thought of being all the way across town from each other sounded monumental. Impossible. Beyond agonizing. 

His feet dragged. He damn near limped to the bathroom door, naked and injured-looking. Ducked inside, slammed the door shut behind him. She knew for a fact that he was facing it, leaning against it, both palms pressed to the wood, and probably his forehead too, and breathing like a steam train. 

It  _ hurt _ . She ached as she forced herself into whatever clothes were nearest. Out and down the stairs, every step like tearing something.   
  
Dawn was downstairs on the couch. She stared in amazement when Buffy landed by the door. “Wow. You emerged.” Then she narrowed her eyes. “Um, you do know that you look like a complete disaster, right?”

Buffy fought to make word-sounds. It took everything she had. “I think… there’s a spell. Back soon. Spike too. Don’t… go anywhere.” And, forcing herself to take the requisite three steps, she laid her hands on the doorknob.

She almost doubled over from the stabbing nausea of it. /God, this isn’t going to work./ 

“You’re kidding. You’re blaming a spell for this sex-fest of yours? Seriously? I mean, it’s  _ you _ two. That’s like a normal… Wait, hold up. Are you okay?”

Buffy had her hands pressed to her solar plexus now, where something throbbed in agony. “No,” she gasped. “I really don’t think…”

Then Spike was calling from upstairs, tight and sharp. “Revision’s in order, love.” From his tones, she knew she was feeling both their pain. 

Fuck.

***

What ended up happening was, he showered super-fast while she left his clothes piled outside the bathroom door, and hung out with her change of clothes in Mom’s room, then entered the bathroom as he departed to perform her own swift ablutions. They then took turns coming downstairs at minimum safe distance, which appeared to be at least ten feet at all times. Ten feet was the magic number at which the terrible, anguished urge to assault each other in a carnal frenzy began to dissolve into an anxiety about being too far apart, and the swoopy-sexy-yummy feels started to turn into a faint nausea. Which was  _ not _ sexy, and while the desperate need to get closer did not abate, at least the altered character of that need allowed for some faintly clearheaded thought processes. 

Sadly, there was no pizza to grab on the way out. Dawn informed them that no one had answered her call to Dominoes, so Buffy settled for a slightly-aged banana as they headed out the door, to tide her over till they could figure this out.

They ended up walking. You couldn’t stay ten feet apart in a car. Which of course meant it took twice as long to get to campus, and they couldn’t tag-team things, but that was the way the cookie crumbled. They would have to call Giles. Which they did. And got no answer. Hopefully he checked his voicemails, and wasn’t off endlessly screwing someone himself. 

They also left voicemails for Xander and Anya, the witch-boy duo, Faith and Graham (who might just be finding their way back to a nice simpatico with all this craziness) and tried to call Wil and Tara, but got no answers from anyone, which was pretty worrying. 

Buffy didn’t try to call her mother. The thought of hearing Mom answer the phone while all blissed out from a two-day boinkfest with this Brian guy was more than she could honestly cope with at the moment, and she didn’t think anyone could fault her for that. /Probably better not to think about it, for sanity’s sake./

The town seemed pretty deserted as they crossed it on a diagonal, heading for campus, with practically every curtain drawn. A few very noticeable noises drifted from not a few apartments. Which, man. How many people did this spell affect? Was all of Sunnydale trying to contribute to a population boom, or what? What age did it start at, and… God, considering how tough it had been to pay attention to Dawn’s needs, were there, like, starving toddlers all over town right now, or would parenting instincts break through here and there?

Then a thought hit Buffy full in the chest, made her gasp. /What about the, like, teenagers?/ Except… “Thank God Dawn’s not affected.” It felt like a prayer.

Spike closed his eyes. “Fuck. Buffy, please don’t ever say anything like that again. I’m begging you.”

Buffy pressed her lips together in a thin line. “Well, she is technically a teenager. And she’s definitely hit puberty. I’ve lived with all the signs. All I’m saying is, I’m glad that whatever it is maybe skipped over her age group, because speaking from experience, trauma much?”

Spike’s expression tightened. “We don’t know that it did. Maybe she’s not affected because she’s not got a human soul, or real human memories, or summat.”

Buffy stumbled to a halt to stare at him where he stalked up the empty street precisely ten feet away from her on her left. The painful thing dragged at her, forcing her back into step, so that she had to jog back into the ten-foot radius required of them. “What do you mean," she demanded, "she doesn’t have a soul? The monk said she’s human. Ergo, she has a human soul.”

Spike scoffed and, slowing to keep their spacing intact in cooperative fashion, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He looked thoughtful as he tapped one out into his hand, shoved the rest back into his inside pocket. “She’s  _ physically _ human. Made from your blood, which is human entire, or you’d’ve shown up before now on someone’s medical records as part-demon. But how could she have a human soul, if she’s still able to do this cosmic key business? And all her memories are invented, to boot." Intensely blue eyes skewered her to the bone. "She’s got all the morals and ethics of an invented human life, but the compass of an interdimensional planar-shift vibration coefficient, or whatever the bloody hell it was Watcher called her. Which bloody well isn’t the same thing as a soul, at all.” Striking up a light with the latest of his many Bics, he cupped the cigarette and lit up smoothly. “Everything she knows of how to function as a human, she’s learned by watching, or doing." He shook the lighter out, slipped it back into his pocket, tugged the smoke away to readdress her. "But it doesn’t come naturally to her. I ought to know. Can tell just by listening to her.”

Buffy was floored. She had never remotely thought about—it had never even occurred to her to question—whether her sister had a human soul, stashed in there somewhere alongside her… Key-ness. A holdover, of course, from having assumed her sister a whole human prior to realizing what she was. But she had had an entire couple of hours of thinking of Dawn as a thing, and invader, some sort of demon or evil sent to her family to impersonate humanity, and in that time she had never questioned the lack-of-soul in her so-called sister. And then, the moment the monk had said _ , “Human. Human, now… She is… an innocent in this,”  _ Buffy had utterly forgotten everything she had worried about prior to that pronouncement. But what if… /You know all about what happens when you smoosh two souls in together in someone. You saw it just a little while ago in Drusilla, all bonkers because she has two demon souls crammed in there. It drives people nuts. You saw it in Angel. It drove him cray-cray for the longest time, to have his human soul in there next to his demon. So… Dawn would be totes crackers if she had a human soul all smooshed in there next to this… This Key-thing, right?/

/Oh. Wow./

“Doesn’t matter a whit as to how we treat her, does it?” Spike opined as he resumed his harsh strides up the street. Stress made his tones clipped, his normal, casual saunter a jarring thing. 

“No!” It exploded through Buffy’s lips, a protestation of innocence as she rejoined their march. “Of  _ course _ not! She’s my sister! And, I mean, it’s not like I judge people based on whether they have human souls, anymore.” She was pretty shaken, though. “I just… never really thought about it.”

They completed the walk to campus in silence, but Buffy thought she felt Spike’s assessing eye on her more than once before they made Santa Rosa dorm. Which was fair, since she didn't really want to think about how much what he'd said explained way too much about her sister that they'd probably all passed off to her just being a teenager; what Spike had more than once called 'a hormone-bomb'. Everything, maybe even down to why she liked those gross-ass food combinations that no normal human would remotely try. Because if they were really subconsiously just the experiments of an interdimensional being having a human experience...  
  
/Oh, wow.../  
  
She couldn't think about this right now. She didn’t need the judgment, though, so she avoided his gaze to keep face-front as they used the one door back on the inside of the quad that never closed all the way, and made their way up to the fourth floor.

The long hall that housed Tara’s room echoed with the sounds of… intimate conjugation, going on behind almost every thin-paneled door, and, /Oh, man, there’s gonna be a rash of unwanted pregnancies or something from this, isn’t there?/

When they reached the door, Buffy did her absolute best to ignore the noises going on inside, especially the part where she recognized the voices, to rap loudly on the door three times. “Knock-knock. Time to take a break. We’re all under a spell, and we need you to help us take it off.” /ASAP, since staying off of Spike right now is…/ It shouldn’t be the case, considering, but all the sounds of people boinking all around them only served to remind Buffy that she and Spike could be doing the exact same thing right now, and that it wasn’t fair that they had to have their minds on business, and couldn’t they just… /Stop it! You’ve had plenty of damn sex in the last few days, and the world needs you! Or at least Sunnydale does. And it also needs Willow and Tara, so…/ She knocked again, a little harder, and focused on the tiny world of her knuckles striking the door. /No listening, and no jumping on your vampire mate. Two simple rules…/

Unfortunately, rule one was kind of impossible. Luckily, the rustling inside broke off, to the tune of a few whispers and giggles. Grateful, Buffy took the moment of… suspended activity to break in while there was still a chance of catching their attention. She was well-aware of how tough it was to think of anything else while in contact with… well, skin. “You need to get ten feet apart. It’s the only thing that works. Seriously, just trust me on this. And then listen to my words.”

More giggling, another loud rustle. Dammit. “Did you hear me? You’re under a spell! Now, go to your separate corners!”

There came another giggle, and then a sort of muffled, “Wait! Willow, wait! Did you hear that? If we’re under a spell…”

“I’m under  _ your _ spell…”

/Oh my God./ Buffy shot Spike a look, sighed. Behind her, her guy had lit up again in that way that said he thought this would take a while. He was smoking almost directly under a smoke detector, the doof. /Heck, maybe that going off might get their attention for a sec./ “The whole  _ town _ is under it. Some kind of massive boinkfest is going on all over everywhere, and we need you two to figure out where’s ground zero so we can turn it off. And no one else is answering their phones, so  _ c’mon _ . Snap out of it!  _ We _ did!”

“Wil, are you listen… Wil. No, look.  _ Willow!” _ There was a loud thump, the sound of footsteps scampering across the floor, and then Tara’s voice a little nearer to the door. “You. Stay there…”

“Wait. What’s going on?” Willow sounded almost stoned. Wow. 

“We’re under a spell! We need to… get dressed…” There was a ton of strain in Tara’s voice, which was understandable, since Buffy had been where she was only an hour or so previous. “I’m gonna go into the bathroom and… and I’ll be out in a few minutes, and then you… do the same, and then…” The sound of slow, sidling feet. “We’ll be out in… a few minutes, Buffy.” An inner door thumped softly closed.

“No rush.” Buffy called. She really did not need to see the girls naked. 

Spike snorted volubly, leaned against the nearer wall, and spouted a stream of smoke directly at the detector. /Nice./

She still wanted to jump on him.

A few minutes passed while Tara got cleaned up in the en suite bathroom she shared with the next room over, because this was upperclassmen housing where they got their own bathrooms, unlike Stevenson’s freshman scheme with the two bathrooms per hall, and how Tara had scored these fancy digs was anyone’s guess. Something about registering early, or a lottery, or something, she’d said, but dang, it was nice up here.

The sound of the inner door opening and closing a couple more times, footsteps sidling carefully, the murmurs of the girls attempting to maintain minimum safe distance would have been amusing if she and Spike hadn’t just been there. As it was, the remembered strain kept it all fresh in mind. 

“Maybe if I go… over there by the bed, you can go in the bathroom, and then I can…”

“Okay, yeah. And then when I get out you can…” 

“Alright.”

Eventually they were ready. “Okay. Just… Oh! Hang on a second.” And there came the sound of a window cracking open and a massive  _ whumph; _ probably the bed being stripped, to punctuate Tara’s embarrassed-sounding words, and, well, that made sense. Buffy wouldn’t let anyone else into her own bedroom for at least a week. She might even fumigate. 

“Alright.”

They edged into the room, leaving space for Wil and Tara to stand at opposite sides. Buffy found a spot for herself way over next to Tara by one nightstand, and Spike followed after a sec to edge over near Wil, by the far side of the bed, next to a dresser. After which he tapped thoughtfully at his cigarettes as if considering another, because he was stressed as all heck.

“There’s gonna be enough smoke in here with the incense, Spike,” Willow snapped, equally tensely. “We already have to do enough to confuse the smoke detector as it is, in here.” Wow, her hair looked like serious medusa coils right now, like they were channeling her stress. Also, they were cute if they thought burning incense was going to work, but no way Buffy was in any space to throw stones. If someone wanted to have a meeting in her bedroom right now she’d probably just burn everything first.

Spike grunted and replaced his pack of cigarettes, nostrils flaring and amusement warring with irritation on his face. Buffy hated to watch how at loose ends he looked when he was anxious and couldn’t smoke, wanted to hold his hands for him to still him, couldn’t from ten feet away. /This sucks./

“Okay, so…” Tara frowned, jittery. “Um, maybe if I pour the circle, Wil, with the salt-sand, and you start the chant, and I join in? I mean, it won’t be as strong if we’re not touching, but we’re pretty good these days at combining our energies, so maybe we’ll be able to do it even from here…”

“Yeah. Yeah. Worth a try.” Willow looked highly frustrated as she grabbed a little drawstring bag from the top of the nearby tall dresser and tossed it toward Tara.

A little incense and chanting later they were all staring at one another in amazement. “The epicenter’s at  _ Giles’ _ house?  _ Really?” _ Buffy couldn’t quite credit that. “But why would he…” No. It just wasn’t an idea she could hold in her head. Not in a million years.

“Could see it,” Spike put in with a faint snort. “Bloke’s pretty hard up. Hasn’t been shagged since last year when that Olivia bird came by, innit? Maybe he did the thing to convince someone to chat him up who’d come to one of his acoustic sets—God knows he’s crap at the chat-up himself, couldn’t bring himself to start in on his own if his arse was on fire—and the hellmouth likely got hold of the spell and spread it to half the town by accident.” He was fiddling with the Bic by now, clearly raring to head over to her Watcher’s apartment to give him what-for.

“I just… I don’t know,” Willow answered, sounding as amazed as Buffy felt. “It just really doesn’t seem like Giles’ style, to do something like this.”

“Well,” Tara put in, philosophical as ever, “either way, we’re going to have to go over there and ask him to take it off. Maybe he doesn’t know that it’s affecting other people.”

/Oh. Oh  _ God _ ./ What if they went over to Giles’ place and he was… Was  _ with _ someone, and… “He’s not answering his phone,” Buffy reminded them, horror stealing over her soul.

Spike rolled his eyes. “If he’s gettin’ shagged, he’ll have been being shagged for the last three days, like all the rest of us, and it’s time he stopped gettin’ his prick wet and saw to it the spell he made is taken off.” His lips flattened in faint distaste. “Not that I mind so much about how it ended, but I’m not a soddin’ fan of bein’ bespelled, innit?”

“I hate today,” Willow muttered, and picked up the bag of salt-sand stuff. 

Tara twinkled at her as they turned in orderly fashion to head for the exit. “I don’t know. It started off pretty well, with that one thing with the fluffy...”

“Tara!” Wil exclaimed, cutting her off before she could out them any further, and proceeded to blush like a rose petal.

Buffy did some lalalaing inside her head. /Okay, no one needs to know this much about anyone else’s life. Ever./

***

There was no answer to the knock on Giles’ door. Buffy shot Spike a hopeful—or possibly a pleading—look where he trailed behind her at the requisite ten feet, Tara at his side. Taking one for the team, he waved his hand at her to tell her to bugger off and let him get closer. She grabbed Wil’s sleeve and moved them ten feet away from the door, sort of catty-corner across the atrium-thing, toward one of the planters, and sat down on one while he left Tara behind to move up close and tilt his head in a listening posture. “Yeah. He’s shaggin’ someone up there,” her vampire informed them blandly, half-smoked cigarette held nonchalantly between two fingers. “Really going to. Didn’t know the old man had it in him. Alright, Watcher!” A new note of admiration decorated Spike’s voice as he said it, but underneath it was a faint note of amusement and of surmise which made Buffy narrow hers at him, wondering what else he had heard. 

“A, didn’t need to know that, thanks Spike. Ugh, now that I’m scarred for life…” She pursed her lips briefly. “You know something else. What…”

He shrugged and put out the half-cigarette against the wall, then tucked it behind his ear for later. “I’d best go up alone. Doubt any of you wants to be the one to interrupt Rupert while he’s getting his end away…”

“Ugh, no!”

“Really, no.”

“I don’t even know Mr. Giles well enough to talk to him much, much less… No.”

“Yeah, well, reckon that leaves me.” Spike reached out, turned the doorknob, grunted when the door opened without fanfare. “Pillock was so excited ‘bout his visitor he didn’t even bother to lock up. Or maybe excited wasn’t the right word, at first…” 

There was that note again, in the back of his voice, and just what…

Spike headed in, got about a foot and a half into the interior… and stopped to stare pointedly at Buffy, who had remained on her planter feeling increasingly uncomfortable at the attenuated distance as the nausea built, but possibly far more uncomfortable at the thought of what was going on inside of that apartment, and… “What?”

“Not gonna make it far up that stairway without you behind me, innit pet?”

She gaped at him for a second, and felt the realization dash over her like a bucketful of cold water. /I’m going to have to go in there. I’m going to have to follow him, and hear… Oh Godohgodohgod…/

Buffy stood with massive reluctance, covering her ears and praying it would be enough. And as she stepped across the threshold, she very much found it wasn’t. She could still hear muffled… things—loud, thumpy, groany things—and no, this was  _ not _ her life. It just wasn’t!

Spike was already halfway up the stairs, and this had to be over soon; it  _ had _ to be, because it was a nightmare, and she had to follow him at least a quarter of the way up the steps so that he could reach near enough to the top to call into the… action to interrupt it. “Well, Rupert. Nice to know you can shag like that anymore,” he drawled, “if the inspiration warrants. Got to admit I didn’t think you’d be the sort who’d do a spell like this, affected half the bloody town, but now I see it likely wasn’t you at all.”   
  
He paused, set the remains of his cigarette between his lips, cupped it, lit up. And when he pulled it away again, his voice had changed completely. “See it worked for you, finally, coming in hard with the magicks.” This last sounded like it was directed to an entirely other person, based on his tone of voice, which was a little harder, a little more darkly amused, a little less comradely, and, who…

“Spike?” Giles’ voice half-groaned, half-squeaked. “What the bloody hell are you doing in my flat? And what… What are you… What magicks?” The last was said with the beginnings of a faint and growing horror.

And then a voice joined in… a smug, almost supercilious voice Buffy recognized, but absolutely never thought to hear in this context, and oh god _no…_ “Oh, come now, Ripper. You had to know I’d stop at nothing to convince you. And that you’d give in, eventually…”

“Hell of a spell, Rayne,” Spike put in, while Buffy was still reeling. “Thought you’d just keep comin’ back to pull at the bloke’s pigtails, as it were, like you were in soddin’ grammar school.” He pulled in a final drag of his cigarette, tugged it away, shrugged as he tamped it out on his boot and folded the butt into his palm. “Finally stepped it up to the big leagues, is it?”

“I got bored of waiting,” Rayne’s voice agreed, sounding smirky and self-satisfied, and this wasn’t happening, it wasn’t, it just…

“Ethan, what the bloody hell did you do?”

Spike interrupted again, before Giles could go into nervous disaster mode. “Put a soddin’ sex spell on the whole bloody hellmouth, far as we can determine—though, give credit where it’s due, maybe that wasn’t the git’s intention. Knowin’ the hellmouth for what it is, he might’ve intended it to be a bit more localized, and it just went a bit out of control. Any road, I think we’re all bleedin’ tired of dealing with your mess every time he comes back tryin’ to get your attention, yeah?” The laziness fled from Spike’s voice, leaving it hard and intent. “Slayer’s done pickin’ up the pieces after his shenanigans. Manage your business, Rupert. He’s just gonna keep coming back till you see him and give him his due.”

/Oh God, this  _ isn’t _ happening…/

“He’s been a part of your life since God knows when, so fix the damned thing, and let us know when it’s sorted. And any road, have him take off the soddin’ spell, because it’s a trial, stayin’ ten feet away at all times, yeah? Meanwhile, we’ll probably have to see if half the teenagers in the town aren’t pregnant, or none of the bloody infants have starved…”

“Oh, good Lord…” Giles sounded like he’d been kicked in the gut.

“It only affects those who are properly ready for the business, actually,” Rayne’s voice broke in lazily, “and truly wish to act on the… impetus. If people have an imperative reason to do otherwise, they will. No doubt all the children in the town are alive, and I’d imagine most of the adolescents are without undue scarring…”

“Ethan, for God’s sake…”

A low, throaty chuckle. “At any rate, I can admit I’ve gotten what I wanted from the spell, so…” A brief, weighted pause. “Tell me we’ll talk, Ripper, and it’s gone.”

“Oh, God…” Giles sounded at his wits’ end.

Another pause, punctuated only by a faint rustling, then, “Ripper… please.” And, oh, wow, Buffy had never thought she’d hear Ethan Rayne pleading. Not about anything. It was a quiet plea, but it was real, and Giles broke immediately. 

“Alright. Christ. We’ll talk. Damn you…”

“That’s all I needed to hear.  _ Rahkar, eridan; khash. Consumatum est, summa Eros… _ ”*

Something seemed to pass over Buffy in a prickling, chilly wave… and then to snap, literally within her loins. And then the nausea-pulling was gone, and she could sag away from Spike, almost gasping, without feeling like it was a crime against every cell of her being. It was only then that she realized she had been unconsciously canting toward him like a bow bent to shoot an arrow, and… /Oh, man, I need to get  _ out _ of here./ Turning, she fled down the stairs and out of the apartment, horrified by everything that she had heard.

“Happy shagging,” Spike put in, cheerily, as he turned to follow her, and trailed her to the door. He no longer kept ten feet away from her, and that, too, was a relief, as he reached behind him to pull the door shut, and, just, /Oh my  _ God _ ./

Buffy leaned back against the stucco wall and stared sightlessly at the evening sky, the new stars prickling out through the faint veil of city lights, and wondered if she would ever recover again from having heard what she had heard inside that apartment. /I could have lived and died happy never ever knowing any of that. Any of it at all./

“So, what was the deal?” Willow asked, now hand-in-hand with Tara as they waited outside.

Buffy waved a hand at Spike to update them. She needed therapy before she could even consider ever discussing it.

Grinning, Spike tugged out another cigarette and began to recount his upstairs adventure with relish, because he was a literal demon in human form.

***

They met at the store, once everyone involved had had a shower and located their clothes and stuff. Faith and Graham spent a lot of their time, while they waited for everyone to arrive, making with the eye-sex and smirking at each other, which, you know; nice to see those two kids getting along so well. After a little while of watching them, though, it got old, and it was almost a relief when Xander and Anya appeared to unlock the front door. Xander, of course, looked sheepish, while Anya just looked satisfied while she plied the key. “I’m just saying, if it was a spell, I’ve been under worse ones, and definitely seen worse ones applied to whole towns. If this guy used a Rahkar’s circle to get Giles into bed with him…” She shrugged a little as she plied her keys. “I mean, technically that’s very bad, sure; at least, according to your human rubric, but it really doesn’t bother me.”

“You’re just saying that because of all the sex, honey. Which, I mean… I’m not saying I hated…”

“Well, good. Because if you were going to, I was going to have to get very offended…”

Faith snorted indelicately. Xander threw up his hands. “I give up.”

Buffy rolled her eyes. Anya’s moral meter was so way skewed.

Beside her, Spike chuckled, because he was equally skewed. 

Wil and Tara pulled up next, apparently in the midst of a similar discussion on ethics. “…Was amazing though, right?” Wil's voice throbbed with awed admiration. “I mean, _ I’d _ have never thought of using a Circle of Rahkar like that, to spread the essence of Eros…” 

“It was  _ awful _ , though, Willow. He removed others’ free will…”

Willow halted in her clear esteem for the spellwork to shift gears. “Oh, yeah, of course, that’s terrible…” she hurriedly assured her girlfriend, “but…” A short hesitation. “Don’t you think that was an incredible innovation?” 

Crickets. 

“No? Just me? Okay…” She trailed off, sounding suddenly uncomfortable. “Uh, hey everyone…”

“I thought it was cool,” Andrew put in, joining them from off to one side. “I mean, I mostly stayed off by myself to one side to hide from everyone, but it was crazy, realizing the entire town was, you know, affected by what was basically a massive love-spell gone haywire… Like, it only seemed to affect people who had, uh, current people in their lives to, you know… But other than that…”

“Uh, yeah, that’s how it worked,” Jonathan answered dryly, his voice flat and nasal. “That’s why when I came by to check on you, you literally  _ screamed _ at me to go away and wouldn’t open the door.”

“Uh, that, uh, was because I didn’t have any clothes on. I was doing my laundry when you knocked. And anyway, my parents were upstairs, and I wasn’t even supposed to be in the house. You know I don’t live there anymore…”

Faith scoffed loudly yet again.

“Uhuh,” Jonathan agreed with her, before turning to all of them with spread palms. “I, on the other hand, ended up making a full and thorough apology to the twins for the thing I did to them when I had my whole, ‘I need to be a superstar’ period. And one of them threw stuff, which was fair; but one of them actually forgave me and said she kind of missed me, and we…” A faint smile crossed his face. “Well. There was touching.”

“Good for you,” Faith put in, fist folded up in Graham’s shirt. “Sounds like there was touching just about everywhere…”

Graham grinned dopily.

“Yeah, uh, congratulations…” Buffy answered, uncertain whether the Jonathan sitch was a good thing or not. Well, the apology certainly was, but the rest… She really wasn’t sure what that meant for that twin’s self-esteem, but it really wasn’t her problem, either. This Ethan Rayne thing was. “Anyway, uh, I guess we should all…” She waved a hand at the interior of the shop, since Anya and Xander were already inside and waiting. “This thing with the Rakker-spell is kind of similar in a way to your Star-Spell, Jonathan…”

“Not really,” Jonathan answered easily as he followed them in. “Mine convinced everyone I was amazing. It was kind of a huge glamor. This one just sort of piggybacked on everyone’s existing emotions and… well, sexuality, and gave it a boost so that he could lean on it to get Mr. Giles to admit to whatever still existed between them or whatever, right?”

Of all the times for Spike to be right in one of his reads of people. “Apparently,” Buffy muttered, and closed her eyes. “This whole thing is just way skeeving me out, for the record…”

“Amen. Can we say how glad I am that I’m living with Joyce, and that I didn’t take the guy up on his couch? I’d have had front-row seats. Talk about no thanks!” Faith made a face. “I mean, more power to the G-man if he wants to get his freak on, but I don’t need to be there.”

Buffy didn’t blame Faith even a little bit for that sentiment. “Yeah, well, I wish we didn’t even have to talk about it, so can we all just skip the ‘Giles having sex with Ethan Rayne’ part of it and get to the ‘dealing with the fallout’ part?” When faced down with Willow and Tara’s sudden and very pointed looks, she flung up both hands in self-defense, almost tripping over the doorframe as she did so, she felt so skewered. “Not because guy,” she hastened to defend herself. “Because Ethan Rayne. I swear. Because,  _ that _ guy?  _ Really?” _

Willow appeared to consider that for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Okay, that’s fair.”

“I’m not entirely sure we  _ can _ skip it, Buffy,” Anya disagreed, leaning against the shelves behind the counter with her arms crossed. “From what I gather, those two have a history. Which means they might end up figuring out a way to rekindle their relationship, if only just to get this Rayne person to stop coming back cyclically to prod at Giles the way he does…”

“Oh, please,” Xander muttered, looking something between as horrified as Buffy felt, and just plain unwilling. “As if waltzing into town to create chaos counts as, what? Flirting?”

“It could,” Faith put in blandly, and shot a pointed, if light, jab in Spike's direction, causing her vampire to eye the other Slayer with interest. "Isn't that kinda what this dude did with you, B? For, like, two years?"

Buffy gaped at her sister-Slayer, horrified by the comparison. Spike, though, merely favored her with a thoughtful look. 

Anya seemed to agree. “I’ve seen weirder methods. Who knows what their history entails, but if their falling-out included Rayne’s unwillingness to stop being a bad-boy, then his coming back over and over to flaunt that bad-boy status in Giles’ face, when Giles clearly used to be one himself… To me that reads as a desperate attempt to get Giles back on his side so they can be together.”

Xander scoffed again. “Yeah, but Giles always responds like he has to kick Rayne’s butt. You don’t kick someone’s butt constantly if you used to… If you used to be…” He trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.

Spike essayed into the silence, eyes on Buffy. “If you’re desperate to touch someone, and the only way you can keep yourself from doing it is to lash out and sock them on the beak, then yeah, sometimes all that passion translates into pain and fighting. And if you’re desperate to  _ be _ touched, and bad touch’s the only kind of touch you can get…” He did one of his one-shouldered shrugs. “It’s not uncommon; especially if your relationship was already a bit… rough around the edges.”

Buffy didn’t want to think about this. She didn’t want to think about  _ any _ of it. It sounded too logical. It made way too much sense, and… God, to think of  _ Giles _ , of all people…

“When you’ve had to go too far in the opposite direction just to stay away,” Spike went inexorably on, “then sometimes getting your hands dirty in that way is the only way to keep them clean in the other, yeah?” Tugging out his lighter, he started fiddling.  _ “Amore et melle et felle es fecundissimus.”* _

“Exactly.” Faith sounded like she one hundred percent agreed. “Whatever that last thing you said.”

/Oh, God… Oh godohgodogodno…/ Buffy didn’t need to understand the Latin saying to get where Spike was coming from with this. Not only would he find this whole thing recognizable enough from his end, he also knew that his narrative would sound all too familiar to a Slayer who had spent a couple of years fighting with a vampire she found far too subliminally attractive, to keep him at arms’ length so that she wouldn’t throw him to the ground and jump on him, and dammit. /Damn you, Spike, for being too smart./

“Well, if that’s the case,” Willow put in, “and they decide…”

The bell rang over the door, and all conversation ceased. They looked up as a body, wondering if someone had ignored the ‘Closed’ sign to interrupt their summit… and were mutually shocked to see Giles enter, rubbing the back of his neck, head ducked, clearly embarrassed. 

Behind him, walking with a jaunty step and looking not remotely self-conscious, strode a well-satisfied Ethan Rayne. 

Buffy blinked at them from her station at the central pillar. Everyone else watched in silence, as well, as the two men moved to take up spots at the table below the ladder deal. The audience stood, as it happened, in a loose semicircle across the store, with Spike of course to Buffy’s immediate left, Anya and Xander behind the counter, Willow and Tara near its corner, Andrew and Jonathan closer to the door leaning against the case full of crystals, and Faith and Graham in the little corner back near the table.

As if becoming aware of the silent regard of a fairly large audience Giles hesitated, then pulled out and took one of the seats there, eyes still somewhat trained on the floor. Rayne, meanwhile, remained standing, arms crossed a little behind and to Giles’ left. It was as if he knew he was on trial and was going to stand it with bravado and pretend he didn’t give a damn, as long as he got to stay right where he was. Which, considering the source, he probably didn’t.

The silence dragged on; not exactly judgmental, so much as the lack of openers from a group in which no one had any idea how to start. Finally, though, Giles took up the conversational baton, as eldest—not counting Spike—and the person who had the greatest stake in the matter. Or, maybe he just jumped in out of desperate terror that Faith would begin things by asking him how it felt to finally get laid. Which, she might have done if he'd delayed for another five seconds, to judge by the sardonic amusement in her eye. “Ah, Ethan and I have spoken—at length—about his unfortunate spell-usage in the last few days. He is… not precisely disposed to make apologies, but he has agreed he will do no such thing again in your town, Buffy…”

Rayne made a faint nod in Buffy’s direction, over his crossed arms, expression somehow both stony and slightly amused, if in a faintly condescending sort of way. 

/Yeah, because I believe  _ that _ ./

“…So long as he and I continue with our… current understanding…” Giles concluded, and then coughed slightly and trailed off, blushing mightily. He promptly tugged off his glasses, as if terrified to see the expressions on any of their faces at the culmination of his little speech. 

Faith fielded that one, because of course she did. “And what understanding is that, G-man?” Her brows were raised pointedly, and her expression was cutthroat, ready to go in for the kill.

/Oh, please, Faith, don’t make him spell it out!/ Not that Buffy didn’t think they needed to know if Rayne was… staying in town, but…

Giles sighed and replaced his glasses, though he addressed his next comments to the open palms of his hands. “Ethan has quite a number of things he will have to deal with, if he is to remain here. He’s made quite a few oaths to not a few rather unsavory godforms and Chaos players, and they may in fact come to collect…” He lifted his eyes then, and fixed them directly on Buffy’s worried gaze. “But I will promise you right now that we will very much attempt to deal with it on our own when he is forced to renege on some of those oaths…”

Rayne flinched slightly; an almost imperceptible movement. “It’s not likely to be pretty,” he warned in that smooth, low, cultured voice of his.

“And, not her problem,” Giles answered, his familiar tones firm with warning as he tore his eyes from Buffy to pin them on the other man.

“Of course not, Ripper,” Ethan answered, and did his voice have… a soothing note to it? “I’ll manage. With  _ your _ help.”

Instead of putting his back up, that insinuating tone actually made Giles go all smooshy. Buffy could see it in the way Giles kind of stopped everything to stare, nodding slightly, the way the tiniest smile tickled at the corner of his mouth, wiping away the attempt at a stern look, and, just,  _ wow _ .

When her Watcher finally turned back to her, he had a whole decisive thing going. “We’ll try not to make it your problem, Buffy,” he reiterated, and he had his brisk tones going for him now. “Try to deal with it on our own when they come calling to demand their due. He knows he’ll have to back down on a lot of daily mischief, but he says he’s willing to do that to be with me…” And a faint, almost adorably dorky smile touched his lips, went all the way to his eyes, and… 

/Oh, wow, oh wow oh wow…/ Giles looked years younger, smiling like that. Because of Ethan  _ Rayne _ , and just, ohmygod…

“And since I’ve been willing to, ah… put aside some of my previous hard lines in order to be with him...”

“Never thought I’d see the day…” Rayne teased in response, but that superior expression had softened to something only lightly mocking, and his arms had uncrossed now, his body language altering from ‘on trial’ to leaning, perceptibly, toward Giles, and…

And Buffy had never thought that her tweedy Watcher would ever entertain enough of a gray-area mindset to even  _ work _ with someone like Ethan Rayne, much less…  _ this _ … but in the last few months he had really unbent a lot. And okay. She knew all about how this sort of thing worked, from being with Spike. How you had to, like, be willing to bend, when you were with someone whose moral meter was a few drops shy, and remind them day in and day out that quick and easy, or even just plain fun and rompy and messy, wasn’t necessarily the best idea, and how to think about the repercussions and stuff; and okay. Clearly she had learned to do it, but she had just never thought that  _ Giles _ would be the type to… To…

Watching her do it with Spike without deciding to throw her to the wolves or hate on her for it was one thing, but doing it  _ himself? _

But apparently, despite all outward appearances, Ethan Rayne meant that much to Giles, that he was willing to work with that kind of uncertainty. That he was willing to take that on for the sake of what this relationship gave him—or even just for the sake of what it had once given him, in the hopes that it might give the same thing to him again, now—and maybe, just for the chance to stop their vicious cycle or whatever. “I guess I… kind of get that. I mean, it’s hard work, though. I guess I just never thought that  _ you _ , of all people…”

Giles’ head rose, and his eyes locked directly on Buffy’s, forestalling any shocked rejoinders or demands to know if he was insane. “The fact of the matter is, Buffy… I’m tired.” And all of a sudden, he looked it; desperately weary, and nakedly vulnerable about it, to her amazed eyes. His voice was raw, his shoulders slumped, the lost struggle in his eyes clear as glass. “I’m tired of fighting to stay away. I’ve done it for over twenty years, and it  _ hurts _ . And Ethan…” His eyes closed briefly, and Buffy didn’t think she had ever seen him look so pained, so wounded. “He’s followed me about since we…” He shook his head then, as if casting something off. “I think he understands, finally, why I couldn’t go with him, and now he’s willing to meet me halfway; now he knows I’ve changed enough to do the same. Which was something I couldn’t do at twenty-one. I was too afraid; too afraid it would mean one of us would… die. That I might lose him. I knew I wouldn’t survive it. Not after…”

Ethan’s hand fell to Giles’ shoulder, squeezed silently. To Buffy’s amazement Giles instantly stilled, and when he took up his narrative once more, his voice had steadied, regained strength. “We’ve done each other a great deal of damage in that twenty years, and spent more time than is really necessary apart, by being proud fools.” Giles lifted his eyes to Buffy’s once more, and he was no longer exhausted now so much as… rejuvenated. “But then he saw me going along with a Slayer who was working directly with demons. Saw me being accepting of a charge who was mated to a vampire… Saw me willing, for your sake, to cast off the Council I’d once championed, when we’d…” Something cracked in his voice, and he closed his eyes briefly. “So he thought,” Giles went on quietly then, and a faint tremble struck the edges of his voice now, “that perhaps I might have changed enough to…” His voice shook again, and he cut off.

/Oh. Oh,  _ wow _ ./

“I’ve grown weary, as well,” Rayne spoke up into the silence. “I may enjoy causing trouble and seeding chaos, but eventually one realizes that there is more to life, and begins to miss the quiet moments one once had with a certain someone. And then it becomes a matter of figuring out how to convince that person that you actually mean it. That you are willing to sacrifice a few thrills of one kind to hearken back to another, quieter sort. I needed to do what I did to kick the door ajar, and I’ll not say I’m sorry about it, but I’ll promise I’ll behave…” His lips twitched as his eyes flickered briefly to light on Buffy’s. “Somewhat, anyway, from here on out. I can’t imagine I won’t cause any trouble for you, because it’s simply not in my nature to do nothing at all to keep my hand in…” They drifted away then, something warm slipping into his gaze. “…But it should be easy enough for Ripper to manage me, and keep me in check.” And he smiled; a small, reminiscent sort of smile that looked… remarkably genuine in that cynical face. “After all, he did it well enough before.”

Giles’ eyes lifted to touch on his, and they remained locked together like that for the longest moment; so long in fact that Buffy started to get embarrassed at the quality of their gaze as they shared secrets from the past, realizations, who knew what all, but it was clearly a lot, and, /Okaaaay./ “Uh, well, I mean, as long as you don’t…”

“Hell,” Spike interrupted her, and lowered the lighter he was playing with, “you lot sound like a soddin’ Air Supply song, Watcher. Never knew you were so bloody soft.” 

Buffy was utterly amazed—and she knew she wasn’t the only one—when without remotely disengaging his gaze from Rayne’s, Giles lifted his hand and flipped two fingers at Spike in what had always been her vampire’s signature salute. 

Spike burst into admiring chuckles. Faith joined him. Everyone else just gasped or stared, because, out of character, much? 

This was, like, band-candy Giles. 

Spike stopped laughing, then, and started to hum; a tune Buffy thought she vaguely recognized from radio stations her mother used to play when she was a kid back in LA. Just when she was about to catch a faint wisp of memory, he broke into song… and everyone’s attention was torn away from the distracted Watcher to gape at Spike instead. Which Buffy realized was fair, since no one but her had any clue how beautiful her vampire’s singing voice was. “‘I'm all out of love’,” Spike shot at Giles, brows raised and expression viciously mischievous, “‘I'm so lost without you! I know you were right, believing for so long!’” 

Giles actually shot up halfway out of his seat at this point, glaring. “Shut the bloody hell up, Spike, or I swear on my father's grave I will  _ end _ you…” 

Spike cut off mid-lyric to scoff dismissively, and shoved his lighter back in his pocket in a show of unconcern. Everybody was still staring at him as if he’d grown a second head… but their eyes were all torn from the amazing, singing vampire when Ethan Rayne very abruptly turned to Giles, slid his hands right into his hair in front of god and everybody, and said, “Actually, our album was Cream. Best of.” 

The entire room jerked back to stare at Giles, hovering there poleaxed with Ethan Rayne’s fingers moving restlessly over his scalp, the whole of his tall body sort of curved around him. Buffy couldn’t believe it. Like, not even a little. Giles wasn’t doing anything about it, and it was just, like,  _ what? _

Every single mouth in the room was wide open, except for Spike’s. Including Giles’, whose jaw had fallen as if he were preparing to say something. That was until Rayne slid the fingers of one hand slowly down along behind his ear, to settle onto the nape of his neck. “Wasn’t it, Ripper?” he asked in some kind of low, intent tone.

Giles’ mouth snapped closed on whatever cynical thing he was about to say, as he kind of plonked slowly back down into his seat. And then it dropped open again, but now it looked like he was just using it to breathe unsteadily. His eyes slowly drooped closed, apparently involuntarily, and he just sat there like a ham with Ethan Rayne’s fingers carding slowly through his hair, and oh,  _ wow _ . 

Spike took this in with an odd expression for a moment, then gave a little nod that looked like recognition. “Hell of a good album, that,” he agreed, and now every ounce of teasing was vanished from his voice. In fact, he looked thoughtful.

“Yeah,” Giles stuttered, sounding like he had no idea where he was anymore. “Hell of a good album…” And he trailed off completely, and all the sudden he wasn't saying anything at all. It kind of looked like he’d utterly forgotten where he was.

Buffy could not believe what was going on, right here in the Magic Box, but one thing was clear. Giles was very obviously totally helpless against Ethan Rayne. Kind of in the way she herself basically forgot how to breathe or think sometimes when a certain vampire touched her with intent… which was a very weird thing to think about, but it was a comparison that was almost impossible to miss right now. The zing of recognition was too great to avoid, watching them.   
  
Which made her realize very suddenly and viscerally exactly why her Watcher had been so harsh around the guy for so many years. Why he had fought so hard to be the tough guy; to hit him, to push him away, to keep him far from them. It had been because if he had given in to a single moment's weakness, if he ever gave the guy the slightest hint that he was open to anything… Heck; if he did anything else but push him away, then Ethan Rayne would have been able to touch him like this, and it would’ve been all over. Because he was obviously powerless against the guy’s importuning; that it would take everything he had, and then some, to resist. She had never seen her Watcher act like this around anyone; even Miss Calendar, and Jenny Calendar had completely turned him into a shy, stuttering little boy. But to look at him right now… 

This was the shy, stuttering little boy plus  _ history _ . And they needed to get  _ out _ of here, because she kind of thought Giles was panting a little bit. “So, um, we’re gonna take off…” She elbowed Spike in the stomach to get him moving.

“Uh, yeah. We’re off,” Spike agreed, and straightened from his lean to head for the door. “Got… loads of things to do we’ve put off in the last couple of days…”

Faith rolled her eyes and caught a grinning Graham’s shirt to drag him around toward the exit. “Right. Just don’t do him on the table, G-man. We use that for meetings.”

Giles blinked back into awareness of the fact that there were other people in the room. “I… beg your pardon! I wouldn’t… I most certainly…” He was blushing madly, now, and trying to shove the other man away, while Rayne kept his hands secured in their nest and looked amused as hell.

“To be fair,” Anya broke in, “this is Giles’ place of business, and what he does in here is entirely up to him. However…” She ducked behind the counter and came up with some Clorox spray, tossed it in their direction. “Clean up after yourselves, okay? It’s only polite.”

Rayne disengaged a hand to catch the bottle midair and chuckled. “Ta, ducks.”

“You’re welcome. C’mon, Xander, let’s leave the lovebirds alone.” And she dragged Xander out from behind the register while he was still gaping in horror. “Giles, I just want to register my complaints in advance regarding the likely loss in sales, depending on how much time you intend to spend closed and having sex all over every available surface of the shop. I still expect to be paid. And we’ll probably need to develop a code, since I have a key. Maybe a hanky over the doorknobs or something…”

Giles looked like he was on fire by now. Andrew looked fascinated, watching the conversational volleyball.

“C’mon, Andrew,” Jonathan hissed at him, and grabbed his sleeve to drag him out. 

“I just never thought, you know, that Mr. Giles…”

“Get dreamy about it later. They need their privacy.”

“Dreamy? What are you… I’m not…  _ dreamy! _ I’m just… surprised!”

“Uhuh. Let’s go.”

They exited, followed by Anya and Xander. 

Buffy threw a few doubtful glances at a still furiously-blushing Giles and his troublesome squeeze, as she exited on Graham’s heels, then got herself hung up in a sort of knot of people on the front stoop while she waited for Spike to hunker down behind the minuscule awning out back, have his smoke, and come around to join her with the car out front. /I guess we’re gonna have a debrief or a council or something first?/ 

Tara, for one, looked all smooshy over the whole thing. “Oh Goddess, did you  _ see _ him? It’s the most  _ adorable _ thing!”

“I  _ know!” _ Willow exclaimed, equally hung up with the adorbs. “I mean, gah! Can you  _ imagine? _ Spending like twenty years missing someone, all because you can’t get over them having a thing for some chaos magicks, and then…”

“Well,” Tara amended, “I can understand  _ that _ , if it’s an addiction and they can’t stop hurting people with it, but I can see it hurting even worse if they never took the time to try to negotiate a solution, or…”

“But to spend twenty-plus years just  _ yearning _ for each other without even  _ talking _ …”

“Maybe they had to spend that time apart to figure out who they really were,” Jonathan interrupted, looking thoughtful. “I mean, do any of us really know who we are, yet? I’m sure we  _ think _ we do, but it could all change tomorrow, right? We could find out something new, or something really traumatic could happen to us to change everything, and…” When he realized all eyes had fallen to him, he shrugged it off uneasily. “All I know is, I thought I knew who I was in high school, and then Buffy found me up in that tower with that gun, and it changed everything about who I thought I was…”

/Okay, wow./ 

“…And then I did the… the  _ thing, _ with that spell, and I thought, wow. I never thought I… would let anything _go_ that far.” He looked down, training his eyes on the concrete between his shoes. “And then you all started being nice to me and letting me hang around you… and now I’m not sure who I am all over again. Like maybe I can become a whole other, new, better person.” He made a twisted sort of pensive face as he resumed his perusal of the group. “My view of myself has completely changed like four times in the last couple of years. That’s a lot. I bet even if we think we know ourselves pretty well, sometimes it’s not enough till life gets done beating us up a lot, so I can see that messing up even a really intense relationship. Maybe they needed to, you know, take a time-out to figure all that out and then…” He shrugged again. “…I guess, back down from some of that stuff and find some kind of middle ground again? And in the meantime they just… grew apart, and gave up.”

“That’s fair,” Graham chipped in, and his eyes flickered briefly over to Faith. “I’m a couple years older than the rest of you. I’ll say that’s fair. Life can really kick you in the nuts a lot between high school and about…” He looked thoughtful. “Hell, I dunno if it’s done yet. My dad says it starts to even out around twenty-seven, so I guess we’ll see. He says it’s the formative adult years, while your brain’s getting done wiring itself or whatever. I could see them having something super passionate or whatever, but not really that smart or a good idea, and then kind of figuring out how to actually do it right later on…”

Faith shot him a challenging look. “If you based everything on whether it was a good idea, you’d never get laid, Cowboy.”

He snorted at her. “I’m not twenty-seven yet. Also, that’s not the only way to measure stuff.”

“Nice save.”

“I thought so.”

Buffy shook her head and turned for the curb. “I’m heading out. I can’t even remotely process any of this right now.” Uncrossing her arms, left the chattering group of way-too-positive-about-this Scoobies behind to seek her cynical mate, and made for the rear of the store. She wanted her vampire, and said vampire’s safe, stuffy car. A small world, comprised of safe arms and a small cab and known, manageable proportions.

The minute she was near enough Buffy folded herself in against him, clinging to the t-shirt beneath the duster and lowering her head to butt into his cool body, just beneath his chin. “This is too weird, Spike.”

A hand rose to caress the back of her neck where he knew she liked it… and incidentally, though he did not know it, over the spot where a tattoo had once been placed on her body, without her consent, by Ethan Rayne. He had never asked about the blurry spots there, where the vague impressions remained of ink that had never quite completely disappeared, or the one scar left behind by the one really bad blister that had almost gotten infected. “You wanna get out of here, pet? Stop thinkin’ about it? Get brekkie, see if your professors are back on their game enough to show up to class?”

Buffy nodded against his throat. “Yeah.” /Probably he thinks it’s some battle scar or something./ “Yeah, let’s go eat and… Crap.” She pulled abruptly away as a painful realization struck. “If they’re all still having a sex hangover, you can help me with my paper that’s now suddenly due, like, later today…” /Hello sexathon taking away all my essay-writing time, ugh! Cue my panic-mode! ‘Cause I have time to suddenly hyperventilate about a whole new thing, on top of all this!/ “Because seriously? I’m not word-girl when it comes to comparing ‘modern prose’ between the turn of this century and the turn of the last century; and that’s on a good day, when my brain’s not all screwed up. Today is such a crapshoot, after all this…”

“Lot less big words, everything a little less gussied up with fancies, and a sight less proper. There was a lens, end of the last century; a proper distance between narrator and reader, like you shouldn’t assume acquaintance. Now, we’re all just fine friends, yeah? Practically intimates, so a narrator speaks to the reader like you’re practically the same person, not even standing side by side and being read to in the park or summat, as once was the case.”

Buffy blinked at him, lost. “Uh, yeah. Sure.” /How does he just pull this stuff out of his ass?/

He stroked her neck again with his cool fingers; almost as good as a nice ice-pack when she felt overheated from panic or overwork or slaying, or just life. “I’ll quote you a few things and you’ll spot the difference, yeah?”

Buffy sighed and laid her forehead to his collarbones once more. “What would I do without you, though? I swear, they speak another language in college…”

“They just want you to analyze your world, pet.”

“Ugh. Fight. Sleep. Sex. Eat. Fight.”

“Primitive,” he accused cheerfully.

She pulled away again to narrow her eyes at him. “Look who’s talking.”

He grinned at her and, catching her hand, dragged her swiftly toward the car before he could start smoldering.

“I just don’t get it,” Buffy murmured a few minutes later, into the quiet of the cab. “It’s like… He clearly has a ton of power over Giles. And I think he was scared of it, the way he always, you know, shoved him away, or grabbed him by the hair and threatened him to leave town or he’d kick his butt…”

Spike snorted as he turned the wheel, guiding the giant vehicle around to the right, onto Whiteoak. Facing west, this early in the day, he could make the drive without the slightest hint of contrails or squinting. “Sounds about standard, for a desperate do-gooder…”

Buffy rolled her eyes at him and crossed her arms. “So, if he's terrified of the power he had over him, why would he give in? I mean, I was terrified of the power you could have over me, but I knew I could trust you, so I knew it was okay to give in. But obviously Giles doesn't trust him, so...”

Spike sighed and hung another right, north onto Oak Park. “It’s like drugs, love. Eventually something can wear you down, if you know it's inevitable, and so sometimes you just give up, if you know something's going to happen between you one way or the other. You give in to the inevitable.” His eyes glanced over to her, and he shrugged slightly. “Trust isn't in it. You just have to let it happen. It's like… falling into a bloody black hole, or magnetism, or casting yourself into the ocean after so long fighting the tides, or sodding well falling into the sun. You can't fight destiny forever…”

Buffy made a face, unconvinced.

Spike narrowed his eyes at the window-slit, but she knew his expression was for her and her disbelief. “Or maybe some things are just in your nature, and you can’t fight yourself,” he finished grimly. “Eventually you tire of the struggle; of holding the same ground over and over again in a fight you know you can't win, because it’s not the other person you’re fighting, really; it’s yourself. You want to find out what it's like to just soddin’  _ surrender _ ; what it'd be like to finally relax and lay down your arms, even if it destroys you.” He shrugged again, as if giving something away. “Even if it's destroyed you before, ‘cause there's a surcease in that.”

“Well…” Buffy could see that. She had, in a way, finally given up fighting the thing between her and Spike, after the motel room. And she supposed she could see how, if that whole thing hadn’t happened, she might have fought it a lot longer, like a doof, and made things a lot harder between them before giving in to the inevitable and admitting who and what she really was, so… “Okay, well, if he’s just ready to, what did you say? Lay down his arms... I mean, I guess it’s not like I can really say anything about that, huh?”

Spike jerked his gaze away from the road to roll his eyes at her very pointedly. 

“Fine. But, like… can he walk that line with a guy like Ethan Rayne? I mean…”

“He’s being cautious,” Spike insisted, and rolled briefly to a halt at a light. His expression went abstracted. “He knows his bloke better’n anyone. Has known him over half his soddin’ life. Git’s drifted in and out of his world since they were bleedin’ idiot kids. Probably had a blazin’ hot love affair that changed his whole soddin’ idea of who he was and all that shite, when he was barely out of nappies, made him question everything he knew about himself…”

“Okay, ew…”

He hit the gas again, pressing them both back into their seats. “I’m just sayin’, Buffy, shite like that sticks with you. You ought to know.”

Buffy sighed heavily and tried not to compare. After a sec, Spike resumed his offhand summary. “Anyway, no doubt it’ll end one of two ways. They’ll figure the thing out, find a balance, or this Rayne git’ll drift in and out of town just like he did before, only this time they’ll shag each time he does, before he gets into too much trouble and leaves again. But he won’t be able to stay away, anymore than he could before, because they’re part of each other.”

Buffy blew a little more air out between her lips. /No comment on that part./ Leaning forward, she made to peer through her tiny, scraped hole in the paint to gauge their progress. “This all sounds very tiring.”

Spike shrugged and swung the wheel again, around the wide arch of the Oak Street entrance and left onto University Row. “For what it’s worth, I can see where Rayne’s at as well. I’m bettin’ he’s getting a bit tired of being peripatetic and causing trouble. Bloke’s getting old, getting’ weary. No doubt he wants a companion. He’ll be driven, since he’s made certain vows and the like…” Azure eyes glanced briefly over to her, smoky in the dim light of the cab. “Rather like still bein’ beholden to blood. But long as the sod spends that energy in ways that don’t mess up my Slayer’s life too much, I’m willin’ to let bygones be. Won’t have to tear the git to ribbons…” He shrugged lightly. “I can respect even a half-assed attempt at reformation, made for the sake of gettin’ into a white-hat’s drawers, yeah?”

Buffy rolled her eyes at him, maybe offended? “Just, ugh.”

Spike chuckled as he pulled in to park in front of Stevenson. “Only sayin’ that I don’t expect the sod at Scooby meetin’s, innit?”

The very thought was ludicrous, even as a plus-one. He was no Graham. “Oh, jeez, no way.” 

“Well, then, you’re likely not to have to bother with him all that much, innit? He’ll be about when Watcher is, hangin’ about in the periphery, but otherwise, unless he gets into some sort of trouble we need to put down…” Turning away from his column shifter, Spike eyed her faithfully. “I can put the word out about town, have the usual suspects keep an eye on him for us, should you want it, love. Know you don’t exactly trust the man will do as he says, for Rupert’s sake. Could help, till we see how it all shakes out…”

Buffy considered it, but… Giles might be really upset. He’d been so insistent that he could deal with the whole thing on his own, without recourse to… external supports. “I mean, we’ll hear about it pretty quick either way, if he goes off the reservation, right?”

Spike twitched a shoulder in unspoken acknowledgment. 

Nodding, Buffy looked away and unbuckled the seatbelt she had insisted he install for her and Dawn, because he was like Dale Earnhardt. “We’ll wait and see. It’s up to Giles. All of it. It’s his…” She was so not going to say ‘relationship’, but… “It’s his thing to deal with, not mine. Until it becomes my thing. And if it does…”

Spike touched her shoulder. “I hope it doesn’t, too,” he put in quietly.

Until then, she hadn’t even realized that was what she was thinking, but...

All she could remember, in that moment, was that look on Giles’ face; the unprotected, unaffected one, without cares. He’d looked so vulnerable and young and…

“We’ll see,” she answered roughly, and shoved her way out of the car to head for the dorm.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Yes, I ship the hell out of Ripper/Rayne and won't ever stop, kthanxbai. _  
_But, it'll be to the benefit of the overall plot, as well as serve to make Buffy analyze her relationship, as well, so I have _reasons.  
  
Rahkar, eridan; khash = _gibberish riffing off of a language I created for my original fantasy novel. If I got into the grammar of that, we'd be here all night. (Generally, "One-of-night, sleep-One, come") _  
  
Consumatum est, summa Eros =_ It is finished, greatest Eros.  
  
 _Amore et melle et felle es fecundissimus. =_ Love is rich with honey and venom. From Titus Maccius Plautus: “Love exceedingly abounds both in honey and in gall: it yields sweetness even in a taste, and produces bitterness to sufficiency”. ( _Amor et melle et felle est fecundissimus; gustui dat dulce, amarum ad satietatem usque_ _oggerit.)_ A quote I think Spike might admire quite a bit. _  
_


	39. Chapter 39

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Ethan rather immediately proves his worth, if in a backhanded sort of way.
> 
> (I swear, I do intend to reply to all of you soon--it's just, my computer has died ded ded ded, so I'm trying to keep up with 3 fics from my phone now while I scramble for alternatives ACK, but I promise, cross my heart I'll get back to you, and I love you all to bits for the kind words!!!)
> 
> Also... almost forgot to mention that I've cribbed episode dialogue in here again, from... what is it? The Weight of the World, I think.

Mom came back from her stay over at Brian’s house without overtly mentioning the long overnighters at all, for which Buffy was super grateful. She immediately threw herself way overboard into momming Dawn half to death and catching up on her gallery business. She also touched in with Giles about her interest in the Magic Box… which was probably how she found out that Giles was no longer… unattached. “Why didn’t you tell me that Rupert has a boyfriend, Buffy?” she demanded, clearly offended at having been left out of the loop.

Buffy was taken aback by the accusation. “Because pretending I don’t know about all the dating going on in the parental set is what’s keeping me with the whole ‘will to live’ quotient?”

Mom leveled her with a pointed stare. “Seriously, Buffy, grow up.”

Stung, Buffy fired back without thought. “Okay, wow, Miss ‘I just spent three whole days over at  _ Brian’s _ house…’”

Mom blushed at that and whirled away, muttering something about how she needed to make sandwiches for Dawn. /Seriously, best comeback ever for shutting Mom up./ She was going to have to use that for the next however long to end any and all arguments.

A couple days later, though, once Mom was all caught up on business and stuff, Buffy found her upstairs putting on makeup, while all decked out in one of her ‘going out’ dresses. “Seriously, you just got back. You’re going out with him again?” /This Brian must be hot stuff, jeez./ “Do I have to give you a curfew, young lady? And when do I get to meet the lucky…”

“Soon.” Mom hesitated, then… “For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure this one’s… normal.” And was there a faint quaver in her voice as she said it?

She was for sure avoiding Buffy’s eyes right now, which was way with the telling, and ouch. /Oh, Mom…/ Was she actually afraid to let her and Spike meet Brian in case one of them informed her he was some kind of monster, or another killer robot, or… 

If she was avoiding the ‘meet the kids’ milestone for that reason, then she already really liked him, and was afraid of it going wrong, so she was putting it off. “Mom, there  _ are _ normal guys in this town,” she murmured softly. “Xander’s…” 

Mom flashed her a  _ look _ . “Yes, except something happened once between you and Xander that you absolutely refuse to tell me about, which makes me wonder just what counts as normal in this town.” And she calmly resumed putting on her earrings, eyes firmly on the mirror, but she had that… that flinty thing going on right now, in her gaze, and…

/Oh. Oh God./ Buffy had relaxed too much. She hadn’t thought that would ever come up. Dammit… “Mom, I…”

“Anyway,” Mom informed her blandly, all steel gone from her voice in favor of chill summary, “it’s a double-date, so you don’t have to worry.”

/Wait, what?/ Buffy was having a tough time keeping up with all the sudden changes in direction in this conversation. “Okay, that’s probably even worse. Is it, like, some random speed-dating thing, or with someone from work, or…”

“It’s with Rupert,” Mom answered placidly, “and… What is his name? Ethan?”

The confession completely called a halt to any and all conversation, and talk about hitting back. In fact, the sally absolutely reduced Buffy to stuttered proto-syllables. “Wh… Y…”

“Going on a double-date. With Rupert and his boyfriend.”

Buffy just couldn’t hold that picture in her head. “Giles… talked Ethan Rayne into… to going on a date… with other  _ people? Normal _ ones? And he  _ convinced _ him?”

Mom turned away from the vanity to regard her with some amazement. “Is it really that shocking, Buffy? It is, after all, a thing people do…”

“Um,” she sputtered, “okay, sure, but not  _ these _ people. As in, not Ethan  _ Rayne!” _ How Giles had talked the guy into this was, like,  _ beyond _ . The closest thing she could imagine Ethan Rayne doing to approximate normal relationship practices was to, like, refrain from creating chaos magicks insanity every second of the day; to keep it to once a week, and less in the way of causing direct trouble so much as a sort of ‘driving Giles nuts for the fun of it’ methodology, because she was starting to realize that was kind of like their flirting. Kind of like sparring was for her and Spike. 

A realization struck her full in the face, then. /Wait. So, forcing him into something completely normal, like going on a double-date with Mom… Is that Giles’ way of driving  _ him _ nuts?/

/Oh my God, is Giles using my mom to play relationship chicken with his weird boyfriend, right now?/

Spike came upstairs at that moment, while she stood frozen in the master bedroom doorway. “Pet, are we gonna go patrol, or…”

“Mom and Brian and Giles and Ethan Rayne are going on a double-date,” she blurted, because blurting was all she had right now.

Spike halted behind her, and promptly dropped his face into his hand. “Oh, Christ, Watcher. Goin’ in that hard in the first week is just cruel and unusual punishment.” And he began to chuckle, in that way of his that was like a helpless slow-clap of admiration.

“I’m right, then? He’s doing it to make the guy nuts…”

“Oh, yeah,” Spike answered, his voice shaking with suppressed mirth. “Oh, bloody hell, what a bitch of a test. I never thought Rupert was this soddin’ ruthless, but he’s showin’ a dark streak right out of the gate, innit?”

“What are you two talking about?” Mom was starting to sound a little miffed from the other side of the doorway.

Spike lifted his face from his hand. “No worries, Mum. I’m sure it’ll all work out fine.” He still had a restrained chuckle creaking away the back of his voice, though he was doing his best to sound grave. “You go on and have a lovely evening.” Turning away, he headed back toward Buffy’s room and got the door shut before he cracked up.

Buffy could hear him laughing like a loon from here. Shaking her head and fighting not to smile, she nodded. “Yeah. Enjoy your dinner, Mom.” And turning away, she followed Spike’s trajectory, went in, sat next to him, and gave up to laugh right along with him, because if Giles was punishing Ethan Rayne for the sex-spell thing… Well, he deserved it, didn’t he? And if it was a test to see if he would stay or go… “God,” she whispered, her stomach strained from the bout of near-hysteria, “remind me never to be that mean to you.”

Spike narrowed his eyes at her, faint hints of mirth still carved in his face. “You’d never be that cruel, pet. You wanted to make me pay for summat, you’d just hit me, or tie me down in bed and take it out of my arse. You’re the helluva lot more straightforward than all that. You don’t play petty games.”

“Yeah, well. Call me vanilla.”

“Never in life.” And he kissed the tip of her nose.

“Still,” Buffy frowned, sobering, “I’m not sure I like that he’s using Mom as a weapon for his, like, test.”

Spike shrugged. “Rayne wants it badly enough, he’ll be charming. Bloke strikes me as the sort as can be, if he puts his mind to it. And it’s just the one evening.” Pushing himself to his feet, he held out his hand to her. “C’mon, love. Patrol awaits.” 

“And that’s our date,” Buffy agreed, rising. “Which one do we got tonight?”

“Peaceful Meadows,” he reminded her. “Faith and her Cub Scout were gonna go to Shady Hill and pretend to patrol, though no doubt that’ll just be an excuse for her to shag the poor fool backwards over a headstone.”

“Oh,” Buffy answered, leading the way down the stairs, “I don’t think he minds.”

“No, don’t suppose he does…”

They were at the front door, Spike girding himself with his duster while she reached for the doorknob, when she overheard the voices outside, on the front porch. “…See why we need to impress this bird, anyway.”

/Oh. Oh, dang, they’re here./ Buffy’s hand fell away as her Watcher answered his paramour’s sardonic complaint. 

“Well, for one, she’s Buffy’s mother, and we’re business partners. For another, I’m fairly certain she was once a Potential Slayer in her own right. She’s that frightening; especially when she found out I was putting aside Buffy’s Slayer stipend, but I hadn’t let Buffy know to avail herself of it.” Giles paused briefly, as if choosing his words with care. “She’s quite… strong-willed. And also… I'd imagine she’d want to know you…”

There was a short pause, then, “Oh, Ripper, don’t tell me. Did you shag the woman in the past?”

Buffy flinched. Spike started to chuckle again, in that silent, helpless way of his. She elbowed him in the belly to shut him up.

“Yes,” Giles answered acidly, “as a matter of fact, I did, but that’s entirely your fault.”

“Mine? How on Earth is it mine?”

“Your sodding nonsense with that bloody chocolate…” Wow. Giles really talked with a lot more Brit-swearwords around this Ethan guy than he ever did on a normal day. It was like he was back-in-time-guy basically all the time; just all-around rougher than his usual, tweed-wearing self.

“Oh, I see. So now you’re blaming my spell for your poor judgment, sleeping with your Slayer’s mother…”

The scorn faded from Giles’ voice, to be replaced with something like philosophical acceptance. “Yes, well, we’ve gotten well past it, but it was still damned well your fault…”

Rayne was still all sardonic. “Nothing like what I was going for at all, you know, since for all of me I was hoping for an entirely other outcome…”

Another sharp pause, and then tones of uncomfortable surmise. “What; you thought I’d come round and shag  _ you _ , instead, is it?”

“Well… I thought I’d at least have even odds on the prospect…” Rayne sounded amused by this little walk down memory lane, and oh, wow.

Giles groaned. “Ethan, for God’s sake, you were the perpetrator of all the chaos in the entire town…”

/Like, for realsies. How many times did he jump on a plot to cause bonkers stuff to happen to everyone around him, just to maybe,  _ maybe _ get in Giles’ pants?/ And all the sudden, Buffy was seeing every Ethan Rayne appearance in a whole new—not to mention, truly horrifying—light.

“Naturally. But it also turned back time for you…”

/Okay, but smug, much?/ 

/Wait. How did the thing with turning Giles into a demon remotely work for him? All that could really do would piss him off, right?/

And then Buffy remembered all of the atavistic hungers being a demon had awakened in her Watcher. He had completely become a creature of impulse. And wasn’t Ethan Rayne a master demon-summoner and -controller? Maybe he’d thought he could promise a de-demoning if Giles agreed to some kind of very personal terms, or… /Unless that one was just straight-up, frustrated revenge for all the times when the other stuff didn’t work. It was for sure more personal than his usual ‘cause a big mess for everyone’ chaos thing./ And, when she really thought about it, that kind of put the point on it, because put in that light… really, with the exception of the Eyghon disaster, which had been about straight-up survival, every one of Ethan’s visits had been pointed directly at Giles. At getting his attention. Like, as Spike had said, pulling someone’s pigtails, or pushing them down on the playground and running away laughing, hoping they’d chase you and jump on you in revenge, and then maybe you could kiss them, and… /Oh, jeez./

After another long pause, Giles spoke up again, this time with a faint, begrudging admiration lightly touching on his mostly-horror. “Bloody hell. You’re so damned immoral…”

“Nothing new in that,” Rayne reminded him blandly. “So, we go to dinner with your former lady-friend and her current beau, who is no doubt far more suited to her uses…”

Giles barked out a laugh, sounding like he hadn’t really expected it to appear, and wow, when had Buffy last heard Giles laugh when he wasn’t drunk? She couldn’t remember at all. “I bloody well hope so,” he could be heard to mutter. “She's a lovely woman, but she listens to Seals and Crofts.”

Gosh, his voice sounded light. Like some vastly heavy weight had been lifted from it; one he’d carried around, invisibly, for as long as she had known him. 

Spike started snickering again, behind his hand.

“…And since he's also an Art History major…”

There came a sputter, which devolved into a low, earthy chuckle. “Oh, my dear, do you mean to tell me that you, former lead singer of Wretched and all, shagged a bird as enjoys—don't tell me—Easy Listening?”

/Wait. Giles was in a  _ band? _ As the lead  _ singer? _ / Well, she supposed that explained the whole acoustic guitar sets at the Espresso Pump thing…

“Hell, I knew Wretched,” Spike murmured, sounding surprised. “They weren't half bad. I thought he looked a bit famil...”

There came a thump against the wall that made the windows shake, made Buffy jump in shock… and then Giles’ voice, low and throaty and dangerous. “You mock me, Ethan, and I'll take it out of your ass…”

When Ethan answered, his voice had gone smug… and more than a little breathy. “Oh, of that I'm quite sure. Why do you think I'm doing it?”

Buffy closed her eyes, covered her ears. “Lalala, didn't need to hear that, don't need to know…”

Spike was back to chuckling helplessly at her side. “Well, best leave them to their fun…” He turned for the back door.

Those damned voices, of course, unfortunately trailed them as they headed gratefully down the hall, and crap, why did the window have to be cracked? “You might get lucky... if you're very, very good…”

“Oh? And what must I do to earn my dessert tonight, Ripper?”

“Charm the woman, Ethan. You can charm anyone.”

“Oh,  _ really _ .”

“You charmed me. Charmed me right out of my trousers. Barely had to speak two words…”

Buffy broke into a trot, gained the safety of the back door, where distance finally made the conversation out there fade out of hearing. “Lalalalalaaaa!!!  _ GOD _ . I’m moving in with you, Spike, and I’m never going on the front porch again.”

“Oh?” Spike eyed her curiously in the gloom of the hall. “Don't think the parentals ought to have a good time, is it?”

She ignored the question as rhetorical. “God, and now Mom's gonna be…  _ doing _ things with Brian upstairs, and I'm really just never coming home again…”

He frowned at her, seemingly surprised at her attitude. “Never figured you for a prude, pet.”

He was judging her. “Look," she snapped, reaching for the doorknob, “yeah, they can have sex, obviously… But it’s supposed to be boring, and… sterile, and…”

“Think I'm past the age limit, is it?” he queried softly. “I was edging in on thirty when I was turned. Old enough by far to have been a stodgy old father…”

She cracked the door and all but ran outside. “But you weren't! You were in your twenties! And you were a virgin…”

“Oil! Little louder, Buffy!”

She was too het up to listen. “You deserved to live it up a little. But, you know,  _ my _ parents should be over all that by now.”

She could breathe again, at least. That was, until she realized her mistake. 

They were outside, now. Which means she could once more hear the voices drifting around the house from the front porch. “You going to knock, then, is it?”

“Well, I have to get myself decent for company again, first, damn you. You scatter my concentration all to bits, and you know it. Bloody hell, Ethan…”

“Have to have my fun somehow, tonight, considering the upcoming company… And I seem to recall that keeping you on edge in a public venue is rather a fine game of chance…”

“Oh my  _ God _ ,” Buffy muttered, disgusted, and grabbed hold of Spike’s duster sleeve. “We’re  _ leaving _ . And maybe moving to Nevada.”

***

Mom seemed to have an entirely other opinion of Ethan Rayne than Buffy did, after their little double date. Which meant, of course, that Rayne was a very good boy all through the whole thing, and impressed her and crap, the big fat liar. “Well, that Ethan fellow sure is charming. I mean, he's clearly a devil, but he's definitely a charmer. And a character… He even made Brian laugh, when he talked about getting himself thrown out of the Picasso exhibit in Spain back in eighty-one…”

Buffy definitely didn’t want to know why Ethan Rayne had been in that museum, but she had no doubt it hadn’t been to look at art. Probably to steal something to use for a spell, or… /He tattooed me and sold me to an evil demon when I was sixteen, Mom, to save his own butt…/ But she kept the words behind her teeth, with an effort. It was past history, and there was no point prejudicing her mother against Giles' boyfriend. Even if he was kind of skanky sometimes.

“...And obviously he has Rupert wrapped completely around his little finger. I never thought I'd see him like this. It's clear they have massive history… and I just...” Mom sighed a little, sounding like she was talking about  _ Passions _ or something. “I've never seen him so much in love…”

Mom was getting all hung up on this. It was obviously the right thing to do to keep her mouth shut. “Yeah, it’s crazy. Uh, glad the dinner was nice. I, uh, need to get to class. Text me if you need me to bring anything back from that side of town, later…”

“Oh. Okay, honey.” Mom looked startled by her abrupt abandonment, but didn’t complain. 

Buffy didn’t actually have class for another hour and a half, and Spike was giving her a ride, but she  _ had _ to get out of there. This whole thing was way wigging her out. /Maybe I’ll go to the Magic Box and, I dunno; see if Xander’s there./ He often was, on his lunch breaks. They could commiserate on the weirdness of all this, since he seemed to be the only one who was as cynical as she was over the whole deal, instead of either cooing over the ‘adorable’ reunion, like the girls, being faintly congratulatory, like Jonathan, watching them like he was seeking pointers, like poor, closeted Andrew, snarking and laughing their asses off like Faith and Spike, or offering laudatory sex tips, like Anya. 

Unsurprisingly, Buffy ran into her guy outside the training room, smoking and waiting for her. “Figured you’d be here. Thought you might need to beat something up.” He nodded with his chin at the door.

_ “Yes,” _ she agreed heartily, and entered when he held the door, because he sure knew her. “First I’m going to complain with Xander, though, because he gets me.”

“Complain away, pet,” he informed her dryly, and put out his cigarette. “Sorry to say, don’t think it’s going anywhere.”

“Ugh,” she agreed, reluctantly.

Ducking her head around the corner from the inside door, Buffy winced. Dangit… the happy couple was in there, because of  _ course _ they were. There was no escape, anymore. “For God’s sake, Ethan, leave off. Go make your excuses to Janus or something. I’m trying to do inventory…”

“Yes, and you’re selling a Karadian Sickle for… Well, that’s bloody well overpriced, when you know they’re mass-produced now, since the Gendians took over the smithies back in eighty-three…”

“What  _ is _ your point?”

“Well, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, oughtn’t you? Honestly, Ripper; and you call me immoral…”

Giles sighed heavily, sounding extremely put-upon as he turned to the man following him around the store harassing him. “Ethan, I really don’t need your advice on how to price my wares…”

“You sure about that? Because you’re charging fifty-seven dollars for that Sevarahk Bloodstone over there. You’re aware, aren’t you, that the thing isn’t even charged.” A sly smile crossed his lips. “I could take care of that for you, if you’ll remember, and then you could knock up the price by at least ten dollars…”

Giles sounded at the end of his tether. “I don’t  _ want _ to sell it charged, Ethan,” he answered, exasperation limning his tones. “I want the idiots who buy it to be unable to use it, so I don’t contribute to a possible apocalypse.”

“Oh. Really?” Rayne settled back on his heels, looking put out. “How very dull.”

He was needling Giles. It was totally obvious. 

“Giles, make him stop. He’s getting in the way; and he’ll drive off customers.”

Okay, so he was also totally driving Anya up the wall. Oh, jeez.

Giles exhaled heavily. “I’d love to, but he really does keep hanging about…” This last came out in disdainful tones.

Rayne just grinned. “Well, since I’m not wanted here, I suppose I could just go out and find some trouble to get into somewhere in town. Minor trouble, of course…”

Buffy blinked at the sudden  _ thud _ , and jerked her head around just in time to be favored with a glimpse of her Watcher slamming his boyfriend up against the nearest pillar, one leg between his thighs, both hands held high up against the wall and their bodies flush, his face only an inch or so from Ethan Rayne’s. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret, Ethan. I don’t want you to make me do anything I’ll be sorry about tonight.”

Buffy whirled away to put her back to the doorframe, and closed her eyes. /Oh, God; this isn’t happening…/

“And now you’ve just given me incentive, haven’t you?” Ethan answered, sounding wholly unperturbed to be pasted against a wall and half-ravished. In fact, he sounded like it made him hot. Which, so did Giles, and Buffy really didn’t need to ever come back into the Magic Box again, did she? For anything? 

Rayne’s head turned then, as if her surreptitious attempt to close the inner door and back away had caught his attention. “Oh, hullo Slayer,” he greeted her, as if determined to absolutely ruin her afternoon. “Fancy seeing you here.”

Spike was cackling again, damn him, as Giles’ head whipped around. He caught a glimpse of her… and his hands snapped open. He instantly released Rayne, stepped back… and went from some kind of crazed Dom to his standard tweedy, dithering self. “Oh. Ah. Buffy. Yes, well. Did you, ah, need something?”

/To never, ever, under any circumstances enter this store, or your house, ever again, basically ever, because nowhere is sacred or safe anymore./ “Uh…”

Spike was having none of it. “Oh, c’mon, Slayer. Don’t play the blushing maiden. That could’ve been one of our games, right there.” 

“Shut.  _ Up! _ ” she hissed, horrified.

Ethan chuckled and straightened his shirt. “I’ll be seeing you this evening, Ripper,” he promised, and sauntered out of the store, walking like he had gotten exactly what he’d wanted from the confrontation. Giles, it must be said, watched him walk away. And kind of forgot to stop watching once he was gone, and was he going to be sixteen again forever, with this whole thing?

Over by the register, a few feet from Anya, Xander uncovered his eyes, dropped his hands. “Is it safe to look yet?” he asked, both lids still squinched shut.

Anya slapped him in the belly with her receipt book. “Prude.” Then, turning, “Really, though, don’t be an even worse prude, Buffy,” she chided as she turned to place some statue or other on the shelf behind the counter. “You’re the last person I thought would begrudge Giles some much-needed sex-play.” She shrugged. “I mean, far be it from me to question his choices—as long as the man stops tinkering with my store and my prices, that is—but honestly. Their chemistry is so hot it singes my arm hair. Clearly Giles needs this. I was afraid his libido would atrophy before too much longer.”

Giles came back into focus at this. “Thank you, Anya,” he put in witheringly. 

Tara’s voice entered the conversation out of nowhere, and wow, Buffy hadn’t even realized she was in the room, she was so quiet through all that, hiding away in her little palmistry and tarot corner the entire time. “For what it’s worth, Mr. Giles, his aura tells me he won’t do anything to wreck this. He’d do just about anything to make this work. And he’s terrified that he’ll screw it up by doing something that’s in his impulses or whatever, but he really just wants to figure it out…” She smiled slightly as she joined them in the central space. “I don’t know what happened before, but he’s seriously over this… this vicious cycle of stupid games you two had going for twenty years or whatever…”

Giles softened, nodded at the floor. “He isn’t the only one,” he murmured.

“I can tell,” she answered, quiet and full of understanding. “Your aura wraps around his the same way. And the way they cling to each other…” She hesitated, then, “If you don’t mind my asking, what was it like? In the seventies? It must’ve… been hard.”

Giles lifted his head, looked away, off into the middle distance toward the door through which Rayne had vanished moments before. “We couldn’t even hold hands, was what it was like. Walking down the street; we had to act like we were just good mates. Had to be ‘flatmates’...” He even did finger-quotes. “I had nowhere to live, for a while, once my family had turfed me out. He let me live with him, and it was…” He closed his eyes briefly, and something that looked like old pain flitted across his features. “It was the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life. Ethan essentially supported me, though he was younger than I. He’d had more experience being on his own, you see; for various reasons.” A faint smile touched his lips then. “He made quite a good living, though, with his magicks. He’s far more talented than I could ever be. I tried to help, as much as I was able, and we…” 

He choked off, shook his head. “Now that our roles are reversed, I can only be grateful to return the favor. I owe him that much and more; and for the opportunity to… To put right what went wrong between us.”

Buffy was honestly floored by this little speech. /Oh, wow./ They had even  _ lived _ together? 

Damn. This had been serious. Like, okay; she had thought at the most they had maybe banged a few times, like some kind of big experiment on Giles’ part, but apparently they had been in, like, a majorly serious relationship before… /Wow, wow, wow... And wait. Does this mean he’s gonna let the guy, like,  _ live _ with him? Because sudden change of status, much, and talk about moving fast./ 

Buffy wasn’t sure if she could handle the idea of walking on eggshells every time she went to her Watcher’s apartment, because he had a live-in partner and might be… “Uh, Giles?” 

Giles’ head turned to her, eyes coming back to the present. “Yes, Buffy?”

“I’m with Anya. You’re gonna need to do the thing where you hang a towel on the doorknob or whatever, like that scene in  _ Dirty Dancing _ . Because I am so not ever coming back to your apartment till you do, or we come up with some other code for when you’re being all teenager-y with this guy. It’s just too weird.”

To her surprise, Giles didn’t blush. Instead he merely narrowed his eyes at her. “I’ll endeavor to come up with something, Buffy. But perhaps this alteration in my status might in fact be the thing which convinces you all to recognize that I am, in fact, a sovereign adult with a life of my own, and that my home is a place that requires knocking and safe passage, rather than being some sort of overflow clubhouse with a permanent open-door policy. A matter upon which you yourself very recently remarked, as I recall?” His words had taken on a scathing edge, toward the end.

Buffy was the one who blushed, now. /Okay, yeah, but I just never thought Ethan  _ Rayne _ would be the hookup you’d land on!/ “Fair,” she managed, and shrugged. “I’m gonna go work out. Let me know if anything jumps off…”

“Can I come work out with you?” Xander asked, sounding pained. “I’ll be the dummy. Put on that poofy suit again, and you can hit me a bunch of times…”

Spike rolled his eyes.

Buffy had finished with the boys and was working on her speed and accuracy with the Kung Fu ‘wooden man’ peg-post. The thing with that one was, it helped her keep her striking depth and her power to a certain range however she ramped up the speed, since if she didn’t hold back, she’d break the pegs off, seasoned, shellacked wood or no. It was good training for using not-killing blows, learning control, all that good stuff. Being mindful at all times, and all that Zen crap. 

She was way in the zone when Spike, who was lounging nearby taking a break from their last sparring sesh, jerked up to attention and narrowed his eyes at the door. “Pet…”

She halted, dragged out of her single-minded contemplation to turn, dewed with sweat, and follow his eyes. “What?”

“I’ll…” Xander muttered, getting up from where he lay on the floor, exhausted from working on his moves with Spike fifteen minutes or so ago, trying to learn better ways to not-die in the field. 

Once he had the door open, the reason for Spike’s abrupt shift in attention became apparent. “I told you, Ethan, she’s training, and she won’t like to be interrup…”

“Well, she’ll very likely want to know about this, so get on, Ripper. Where’s this training room? Is it that way?” And out of nowhere, Rayne’s head poked past Xander’s hand, into the doorway. “Oh. Sorry about that, young woman…”

Buffy sighed and lowered her fists. He’d already totally interrupted her flow, so she might as well know what was up. 

Giles shoved Rayne aside roughly and came into the room. “Alright, then, let’s hear it, Ethan.” And he stationed himself next to Spike, by the wall. Spike lifted an eyebrow and stripped off the pads he’d had strapped to his hands, tossed them over to Xander, who caught them deftly and dropped them on top of his poofy-guy suit, and oh well. Everyone’s attention was pretty thoroughly diverted and unlikely to get back into the saddle anytime soon, so there went training.

Rayne shrugged slightly and pushed the rest of the way in to turn the knob and nudge the door carefully shut behind him. “This will probably actually involve you, in the end, Ripper,” he admitted. His dark, intelligent eyes flickered then from Spike, who he probably knew was a fixture in her every meeting, over to Xander, who stared back in challenge. They slid off of him again in a vaguely unsettling way just shy of dismissal, before coming to Buffy and landing with an odd, assessing look. “Just thought you lot ought to know, there’s a player in town who’s been quiet enough in his dealings that your resident Master vampire likely hasn’t found out about him.” Spike immediately straightened at this, looking affronted as hell. Rayne didn’t even skip a beat. “He’s bound to cause a great deal of trouble, in that word is he knows something about your visiting godhead.” The skanky dude tilted his head. “Possibly he’s helping the creature. Which, for all of me, would normally constitute little more than good reason for me to promptly skip town…”

“Ethan,” Giles eked out in a pained whisper.

“…It being an indication that things are possibly still on schedule in that arena,” Rayne went on without skipping a beat, and smiled ingratiatingly. “But since while I like a spot of chaos, maybe a bit of violence before tea, I’m certainly fonder of this world in a general sense—at least on most days—than to want to see it sent utterly down the loo…”

Giles’ patience fled. “For God’s sake, Ethan, what are you on about?”

“Yeah,” Buffy snapped, incensed at the accusation. “Spike’s all over this town’s underground. He wouldn’t miss one of Glory’s minions hiding in the populace, or…”

Rayne pursed his lips and took on a faintly mocking expression. “Beg to differ, my dear. This gentleman, if you want to call him that, by name…” He halted, shook his head slightly. “Well, no doubt his true name is all but unpronounceable to us, but the moniker he uses in this town is ‘Doc’…”

Spike froze. So did Buffy, while a chill ran through them both. /Oh, crap./ 

“He’s quite the powerful warlock, for one. For another, he’s a hand in any number of pies. I understand he’s had demons filtering him all sorts of illicit items over the last year, while you’ve been none the wiser…”

There was no  _ way _ . No way at all. They had spent the last couple of months trying to locate this mysterious ‘Doc’ character, after the run-in with those Thurgalds down on the docks, only to come up empty. Ragat’s guys had been right; he’d kept the heck of a low profile. Not even Spike had been able to turn up anything, much less her or Faith. 

The thought that this irritating asshat of a sorcerer had managed to find the creeper in less than a week was just… “You’re… No  _ way _ . You found  _ Doc _ ?”

“Buffy, who…”

Buffy flicked her eyes briefly to Giles, back to Spike, settled in with shared, hard certitude. “The one who had the order out for the Tagash venom. The one who had all the illegal orders in.”

“Oh. Oh, good Lord.”

“Yeah. Him.” From Spike’s expression, he was pissed. Pissed that he hadn’t found the guy first, pissed that this random dude Giles was screwing had found an in so easily when he couldn’t. Pissed about what it meant with regard to his reputation in their town; as a white hat now, on the Slayer's side and not to be trusted, and, just... /Oh, this whole thing is just wrong./ “How the heck do you know he’s involved with Glory?”

Rayne shrugged. “Had her name on something of his, when I got into his place a bit ago, trying to talk him out of an artifact I wanted. Statuette. Nothing all that interesting. Saw it plain as day, scrawled over a bit of parchment marking a page he was studying. Some sort of rite to glorify the name of… well, ‘Glorificus, Queen of the Nether Realms of the Triad of Pain’, or some bloody thing.”

Buffy closed her eyes. /Oh God./ “We need to find him, if this is true, and deal with him; like, yesterday. Spike…” So much for getting to class on time.

When she opened her eyes, he met her gaze in full understanding of her intent. “Yeah.”

Rayne’s interested commentary broke in to shake them loose from their unspoken conversation. “Surely you’d have to come alone, at this time of day?” he asked suavely.

/Okay, if you’re trying to get me off somewhere without my vampire… If this is a trap or…/ 

Beside Giles, Spike had already set up a low growl as she replied. “Oh, you’d be surprised how little Mr. Sunshine sets back my vampire,” she informed the man grimly. “You. You’re coming with us. You’re gonna show us where this Doc guy holes up.” /And if this is a trap… I kill you. I don’t care how much you mean to Giles./

If not, of course… /Then, amazingly, you might’ve already earned your keep./ Which would really blow her mind, but then again, sorcerer, so… She pushed away from the dummy and headed for the weapons wall, Spike already at her heels.

Giles looked more than a little taken aback. “You’re bringing Ethan?”

“I need him to show us where to go, right?” she answered, because, duh. /Also, way not letting him out of my sight, with this. Hm, what to bring…/

“Couldn’t he just tell you where to go?” Giles sounded weirdly uncomfortable with the idea of her going anywhere with his squeeze. Possibly for both stated and unstated reasons. Giles was no idiot, and maybe he didn’t entirely trust the guy yet himself.

Buffy turned to regard her Watcher flatly. “Come with us if you’re gonna, Giles, but I’m about to go face down some random sorcerer in some skeezy part of town; a player we’ve been trying to find for, like,  _ months _ . I’m taking him, since he found the guy for me. It can be a test of loyalty or something.” Already at her side, Spike grunted agreement and reached out to catch Rayne’s arm and drag him into custody.

“Well, loyalty is a bit of a stretch,” Rayne qualified, looking unperturbed to be grabbed at by a vampire. “Call it instead, perhaps, the greater share of self-interest?”

“Potayto, potahto…” Picking up a nice glaive because they were handy, Buffy shoved a sleeve over the blade so it wouldn’t look completely insane walking down the street, snagged a sword for Spike, and headed for the door. /Dammit, why didn't we have the girls put that invisible-sheath spell on literally everything, instead of just one set of scabbards?/ 

She passed it to him as they bunched up at the exit. He took it with a faint, mirthless quirk of the lips, eyes hard on the back of Rayne’s head.

“I’d like to come along, then,” Giles put in. Out of nowhere he was there too, at the door, crowding there with the rest of them. “Xander, could you please tell Anya I’ll be back shortly?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ll… Yeah.” Left behind at the far side of the room, Xander turned for the inside door and headed back into the store. 

Once outside, Giles closed the outside door behind them, and frowned at the sun-baked DeSoto. “This is likely to be a stuffy endeavor. No doubt it’s like the Sahara inside that monstrosity.”

“You get used to it,” Buffy answered. “One of these days, we’ll get air conditioning put in. And I have ideas for the windows…”

Spike lifted a brow in her direction, though his expression didn’t alter from ‘stonily frustrated’.

“We could take mine, if Spike were willing to follow in his. It’s certainly airier…”

Spike spoke for the first time. “Drive your cock on wheels if you want, Watcher, only let’s get on.” 

Giles looked offended. 

“No, I want to keep an eye on your boy-toy, here. No offense,” Buffy went on, eyeing Rayne flatly, “but I’m not sure if I trust you, till we get there.”

Rayne merely spread his hands. “Understandable.” He was still being frog-marched by Spike, though he was acting as if this was all some sort of dignified stroll.

Spike shoved the man at Buffy and tugged his duster over his head, preparatory to making his dash to the car. Buffy caught the guy easily and secured him with her free hand. 

“Would you perhaps like an invisibility spell for these magnificent tools of yours?” Rayne inquired in genial tones as she followed her vampire’s mad dash to open the car and shove him toward the back seat. 

Buffy sighed and swung impatiently around. “Make it snappy.”

Leaning out of the oven-like interior, Rayne lifted a brow and wiggled his fingers… and the glaive in her hands completely vanished. Like, it was still there, heavy and substantial and all whooshy when she swung it, but it might as well have been fumes to the naked eye. “Well. Okay then,” she admitted, faintly impressed in spite of herself, and yanked off the now-pointless sleeve.

Another finger-wave, and the sword in Spike’s left hand did the same disappearing act. He grunted from behind the wheel, trying not to sound impressed, and did a few practice stabs into the hot air of the cab, making Giles jump as he moved around to slip into the rear seat opposite Rayne. “This gonna last forever? Need to be able to find ‘em again once we put ‘em down.”

“I made it an hourlong cantrip.”

Spike grunted again, sounding somewhat more positive.

Rayne’s other brow went up as he took in their reactions. “Surely you’re used to that sort of thing. The young woman with whom you are so close—Willow, is it?—is quite accomplished, and looks to become more so with every day. She has a vast well of untapped power at her fingertips…”

Giles looked pained as he closed the car door behind him. “Please, Ethan, do let her find her own way. Don’t encourage her in any specific directions. She’s enough problems controlling her gifts, living on a hellmouth…”

Rayne chuckled richly into the arid atmosphere. “Yes, I’d rather imagine that would wreak all sorts of fascinating havoc on one’s developing talents, wouldn’t it?”   


Spike already had the car started as Buffy took her standard place in the front passenger seat. They peeled out, Buffy with her wind-wing carefully open to admit some air, the guys in the back with their windows cracked and gasping out into the afternoon while Spike headed toward the part of town indicated by Ethan’s theatrically understated hand-wavings. “Yes, and then onto that street with the odd name; Tauamount, is it? Then on, toward that truly awful demon pub…”

They were heading toward the shipping yards, which wasn’t all that surprising, Buffy thought, considering demon-haunt, but shouldn’t she have found this guy by now, if… 

She couldn’t help it, and blurted out, “What made you think I didn’t already know about this Doc guy?” And she shot a look over her shoulder at the bizarre sorcerer currently attached to her Watcher.

Rayne shrugged, his long arm, she was trying not to notice, lying along the back of the seat so that his fingers could trail up into the fringes of Giles’ hair. “He’s still about, isn’t it?”

/Good point, I guess./ 

“I rather figured that if you knew about him, you’d have already dealt with him. After all,” and here his voice went rueful, “you always seemed to dispatch my little schemes fairly swiftly.”

“Well, to be fair, Ethan,” Giles put in at this, “yours tended to be rather ham-handed.” Far from appearing upset about being handled while they headed into the field, Giles was leaning back into Rayne’s touch. Also, he had one hand lightly resting on Rayne’s thigh.

Buffy turned around to face forward and tried not to think about the fact that this was exactly the way she and Spike tended to sit in the car together, because if she did it would definitely mess with her head.

Behind her seat, the debate continued. “They were meant to be, weren’t they, Ripper? Dispensed my duties to whichever deity without fuss and, more importantly, they got your attention, which was more or less the point.”

Buffy couldn’t. She really just  _ couldn’t _ .

This ‘Doc’s house was right down by the tracks. It didn’t look like much; just another sixties-era suburban house falling into ignominious disrepair from that sort of benevolent disregard that cities paid to houses left unattended in industrial areas. Sunnydale was letting the housing values fall in the whole area; probably so they could eventually buy out the holdouts among the owners and then raze the land, rezone it, and turn it into warehouses or whatever. They pulled in under an empty carport to behold a dusty yard gated with sagging, rusted chain-link and decorated with a few straggling yuccas behind low, wavy-brick edges, and dirty gravel beds full of faint, weedy upstarts. The yuccas looked like they hadn’t bloomed in years, and the rest of the yard was graced only with long-dead, crispy-brown grass, but was oddly neatly-kept for all that, as if someone had trimmed things around the edges here and there but had never once bothered to water, in a sort of cruel attempt at keeping the place in good shape by discouraging growth through austerity.

They got Spike under the dubious shade of the tiny stoop, up against the raw stucco of the wall, then rang the bell, while he attempted to peer through the arched, dusty window set into the door. Nothing, for a second, then, “It’s always open.”

The voice sounded as unaffected as the yard.

Buffy led the way in, yanking open the metal security screen, also unlocked, and marching into a cluttered foyer with Spike at her back. Rayne trailed him, Giles at his back, while she took in her surroundings, and  _ man _ , this Doc guy was a pack rat!

The house, one from about the same era as Giles’ apartment, was loaded with stuff. She almost couldn’t take it all in at first. Aside from the same color of light lime-green walls, there was the occasional inset of Spanish tile, like over the fireplace; which was lit, even though it was getting a lot warmer now it was March, and the place was almost as stuffy as the inside of Spike’s car in here. Maybe this guy was a part-demon, and came from a species that needed a hot environment? 

She was already sweating as she passed piles of books, papers, statuettes, knickknacks, entered a main room with a bar that let into a kitchen with standard, painted cupboard doors, and had high, arched half-windows that didn’t open, probably overlooking a side-yard, over the fireplace. Too bad, because the place could use airing out. It smelled like heat and old books and something sour and slightly worrying and definitely esoteric in here. 

Hunched over a seriously loaded table near the fireplace was a totally unprepossessing-looking guy in striped pajamas, with iron-gray hair, round glasses, and an almost sweet face, who didn’t even look up as they entered. “What can I do you for?” he asked, peering as he did into some massive-looking book with text written in a language Buffy wasn’t even going to  _ try _ to identify.

“Oh, you know. Heard you were the guy to come to if you wanted Tagash venom, or a Box of Gabrok,” Buffy needled sweetly. “You know. Word around town.”

The gray head rose slowly, and weird, dark eyes with too-wide pupils regarded her through coke-bottle lenses, before flicking briefly behind her to light on Ethan Rayne. She thought she saw them tighten briefly around the edges before they went all innocent again. “All out of the Tagash venom, since my supply-chain was disrupted. But you’d know about that, wouldn’t you, Slayer.”

Buffy shrugged nonchalantly “It was the least I could do. So. Do you have a real name, or is it just, you know, ‘Doc’?”

The funny old dude just eyed her, looking way unconcerned. “Nothing that you could pronounce,” he informed her without the slightest note of concern. He actually sounded sweet as he switched to a faint smile. “Don’t suppose I could interest you in a spell. I’ve quite a number put by here that might do you a world of good.” He pushed himself to his feet. “I know you’re fairly content at the moment, but that could change anytime…”

“I’d stop moving if I were you.” No way he should even be  _ hinting _ at a threat right now. Not even in a good-natured, general-direction kind of way. Just, no.

He halted, watching her with those oddly flat, almost snake-like eyes. “I don’t very much appreciate your coming into my home and making demands. You’re a sweet young thing, but you’ve no real power in here…” His eyes drifted to Rayne again, and he frowned slightly. “As to the rest of you… One might think the code of sorcerers means something these days, but it seems that it does not, anymore.” Disappointment threaded through his tones near the end.

“Sorry, chappie,” Rayne put in with a shrug, and glanced around the room with interest. “Took one good look at the place and thought I’d get more out of you if I threw in with her and tossed your flat. No hard feelings, I hope?”

Buffy swore she could  _ hear _ Giles taking off his glasses in exasperation. Shaking her head, she ignored the bad-guy interplay to focus on their mark. “I’m after a few things. One, I want to know what you know about Glory. How you’re mixed up with her…” It was best, in interviews like this, to keep the upper hand, avoid letting jerks like this take over.

Doc tilted his head slightly; an oddly inhuman move. “Glory. Hm. Ooh! You don’t mean… Glorificus?” And just like that, his tones went from faintly threatening to diffident, his entire being settling back to ‘unthreatening old man’. “Gosh. You don’t wanna get mixed up with her; that’s a sure way to get yourselves killed. I hear she’s awfully unpleasant.” Getting up from his desk, he wandered over toward a smaller table, over under the front window, under tightly-closed blinds, overlooking the yuccas. A low lamp there shed light over an old, beige rotary phone, some pamphlets, an air-purifier, and a couple of orchids. He fingered them briefly, looking all casual in his jammies, then turned his back to a tall file cabinet and eyed them like he was just the sweetest little old nobody. “When it comes to hellgods, my best advice is to get out of the way… and stay there.”

“Uhuh,” Buffy answered, wondering what had prompted the strange, sudden move, the weird body-language. Why get up? Why was he clasping his hands in front of him now? He was just… acting funny. “Yeah, well, for all we know, she’s been knocked out of the running. We’re just covering our bases. Honestly, we’re mostly here because of part two; the part where you’re screwing up the bottom-line in our town…”

Dark eyes flickered to where Ethan Rayne stood, back near the foyer with Giles. “When you find out a new sorcerer has come to town, you put out feelers, arrange a meet; especially when you’ve felt his presence before. I’d never thought, considering…” The unthreatening mouth turned downward slightly in what looked like disgust. “It seems some people’s ethics are less stringent than others.”

“I do what best suits me in the moment,” Rayne answered the apparent accusation easily.

“I see.”

/So, I guess Giles’ boyfriend broke some kind of evil-wizard code by bringing me and Spike here, or whatever?/ She wouldn’t have thought Rayne had had it in him, but she’d take it. “…But since we’re here anyway, and you kinda brought her up, if you’ve heard any news to indicate that Glory’s still around, I’ll take that too, before I decide what to do about your whole little black-market, underground smuggling demon-ring thing…”

Doc’s expression went hard, almost angry; a change easily read behind the attempt at ‘harmless old man’. Despite his expression, his tones turned almost fawning. “I’d like to help with your god-problem, but I’m a small-town guy. This Glorificus—if it is her—she’s big-city…”

“Of course, if you’re not helpful, there’s nothing mitigating here, and we’ll just wrap you up with all your Dark Magicks crap…” Buffy waved a hand, because she knew off-limits books when she saw them. Those ones stacked up by that wall behind his desk reeked of power. They made every hair on her body stand up; and not in the nice, ‘Spike is right behind me feeling sexy’ kinda way. More like a ‘could scrape the skin off your bones with invisible teeth and screams’ kind of way, which was so much less with the fun. And if Ethan Rayne had set this up because he wanted to get his hands on them, then that was just clearly dicey. “…Take you down to the Magic Box, figure out how to keep you under wraps; you and all your contraband…”

One withered hand rose. The round glasses came off, and ew. Those eyes looked oddly beady without their magnifying presence. Also, woah, now that face was set and hard, no matter how this Doc guy kept trying to sound ineffectual. “I didn’t say I couldn’t help at all, Slayer,” he groveled. “I may know a fella… who knows a fella… in China…”

Buffy sighed and shot a glance at Spike. “I don’t have time for this.”

Spike didn’t even bother to meet her eyes. His poker-player's gaze had narrowed on the great, performing grandpa. “You’re lying,” he growled. “You know the hell of a lot more than you’re saying. It’s why you’ve kept out of sight for so bloody long.”

“I’d have to agree,” Giles murmured from the back.

“He’s also standing directly in front of the very thing you need, I would imagine,” Rayne called cheerfully from his spot just behind Giles’ position. 

Buffy shook her head and spun her invisible glaive. /Well, that settles that./ She was so over all of this. “I say we kill him.” For one thing, it would save them time and hassle when it came to their whole community peacekeeping schtick.

Her words must’ve broken something in Doc’s little act; either that, or he really was protecting something, because that was the moment in which the guy made like Spiderman and _jumped_ _across the entire room_ , diagonally, to grab a sword from over off the wall behind a stack of books. “Idiots,” he hissed, pointed the bright, very sharp blade at Buffy, and…

While Spike was still swinging and Buffy was stepping back to take up an instinctive three-point stance forty-five degrees to his right so they could effectively fight the guy off together, Giles was already in motion. He dodged around their combat positions, grabbed up the old manual typewriter from between the piles of crap on the desk… and whacked the dude over the back of the head with it.

They knew they were in trouble when instead of going down, Doc merely spun on one heel, the massive, heavy weight of the ancient device toppling off his head, to shoot his tongue out of his mouth while Giles was still retreating. And, okay. That tongue was five… ten…

It was super long. And strong. And it slammed Giles back up against the far wall, behind the desk, so that he hit his head on it, right between a lamp in a sconce and some esoteric symbol in brass or gold or something, curlicueing all over the wall. A couple of nearby paintings of religious figures trembled to hang askew as he slid down, and jeez. Was Giles ever going to  _ not _ get smacked over the head during a fight? Like, ever?

Spike was at her side, and they were closing with the whatever-it-was, as the insane tongue scrolled back into his mouth like a tape-measure, and, “You think only underworld bottom-feeders worship the Beast?” Doc informed them, shot the tongue out again in a feint at Buffy—or was it a feint? Maybe not, when it wrapped around the handle of the glaive and ripped it from her hands to drop it about five feet from her on the cluttered floor. “She will return, stronger than before. The damage you have done her has scarred only her shell in this dimension! I will bespell it back to health, and she will arise again to destroy you all and reclaim her place!” And he kicked at Spike, hard enough to knock his invisible sword aside—like, jeez; could he see the weapons despite the glamor? Or, could he see the glamor itself? Like some kind of magickal emanation, or…

And then he was diving away, back toward the same corner where he’d been standing moments ago, tossing aside his silver sword, and…

“Oh, do get up Ripper…” Behind them, Rayne was dragging a woozy Giles to his feet, and Buffy had no time to watch Ethan Rayne, who wasn’t likely to help them anyway. All her concentration was on the battle as Doc grabbed some sort of shiny wooden box off of the far corner of the side-table and dodged toward the fireplace to toss it right into the roaring flames, and…

Buffy was still diving toward her invisible glaive in a tuck-and-roll, hoping to find it by memory of the sound of where it had struck the rug so she could come up with it. Spike was at her side, face tight with frustration…

And then the box was floating up, out of the flames, only smoking slightly, and Doc was yelling, “NO! You  _ imbecile!”  _ and running toward Ethan and Giles with his hands hooked like claws, and Buffy swung around in time to see that Giles, still unsteady on his feet, had slapped his hand into Rayne’s left, and Rayne had his right hand out… and was lifting the box out of the fire with magicks.

Buffy had thought only the girls could do that… That power-sharing thing. That Giles and Ethan Rayne could do it too, and on the fly like this, told her a lot. Maybe a little too much, about how they worked, and had worked once upon a time.

No time for that right now, though. Doc was on them, and Buffy had her unseen glaive back in her hands. She threw it at the same time as Spike let go of his weapon. 

Doc thumped to the floor of his shabby home, headless and with an invisible sword through his center-mass. 

Breathing hard, Buffy stalked warily closer to prod at the body with one foot. “Well,  _ he’s _ not human,” she pointed out upon the sight of thick, clear-ish, very blue blood. 

“Would’ve thought that was obvious by the tongue, love,” Spike informed her, and kicked the headless body over. “And the bit where I didn’t need an invite, yeah?”

“Oh, right.” Buffy had honestly forgotten about that part, she was so used to Spike just kind of going wherever she went. 

Well. The guy also had a tail. Alright, then. Talk about topping it off. “Whatever he is, he’s not going to be helping Glory return to power or whatever now. And what the hell was he talking about, ‘her dimensional shell has been damaged’? Like, from us blowing her up, you think? What spell could he do to fix her up?”

To one side, Giles exhaled hard and dropped his hand away from Rayne’s grasp. “Bloody hell. At least he’s not likely to do it anymore.”

Rayne tilted his head and eyed him with obvious concern. “You alright, Ripper?”

“Yes, I’m… I’ll do.”

Rayne nodded, smiled faintly. “Thanks for the boost.”

Their eyes met, and Giles did that one faint, shy smile in return. “It’s been a while. I didn’t know if…”

“Oh, it’ll always work. It’s you, Ripper, and it’s me.”

“Right.”

Their gazes remained locked as Rayne lowered his free hand, without paying the slightest attention. Over there, by the cluttered desk, the smoldering box settled to the soiled rug.

/Oh, wow…/ Buffy thought, and prayed that the magicks thing wasn’t, for these guys, like it was for Wil and Tara, because no one needed to know about that. 

“Nice whammy,” Spike put in as he knelt on the rug in front of their prize. 

“Take care around that, I’d say,” Rayne warned as Spike reached out one-handed.

“Yeah, I like you un-flamey,” Buffy remonstrated, mildly perturbed as she sidled in behind him.

“That, and it’s likely your missing Box of Gabrok, young woman,” Rayne put in. “I’d not hazard a guess as to what he’s keeping inside the thing, considering the creature’s last words.” 

/I know, right? Note to self not to open it without a spell-circle or whatever./

Stepping away from Giles, Rayne turned to crouch before a stack of books. “It’ll be nice to inherit some of this mother lode, I expect.”

Giles, who had been making unsteady progress toward the Box of Gabrok, frowned back over his shoulder at his paramour. “Ethan, your self-interest in this matter has been made plain enough. You’ve made it clear that you joined in largely to ensure we had access to this fellow’s library.”

Rayne shot him a glance weighted with heavy-lidded surmise. “One never knows what’s in such a collection. It could become exceedingly useful. Not to mention I’d imagine you lot would want to keep this sort of thing out of the wrong hands, and all that sort of nonsense…”

“Good of you to tag that onto the end,” Giles answered wryly, still squatting next to Buffy and Spike.

“So cynical, my dear,” Rayne answered in dry tones, and reached out to pull a tome off the top of one of the leaning stacks to peruse it with interest.

“I know you, don’t I.” It wasn’t a question.

“He did help, either way,” Buffy admitted after a moment. “Whatever his motivation, I’ll take it. Let it go, Giles.” Her Watcher was possibly being harder on his live-in than he needed to be, considering what the little visit had netted them. After all, Rayne had located a person of interest for them they hadn’t been able to find for months; and apparently just in time before he did who knows what to help Glory to come back into her power or something. 

They wrapped up the box in a hank of cloth Spike found draped over another pile of books, and Buffy dodged outside to gently set it in the back seat of the car. She came back to find herself in the middle of an argument. “Surely he’ll permit us to fit a few of the more dangerous ones in his boot…”

“Oi! I’m not volunteering my car for your procuring expedition, Rayne…”

“Oh? Do you want the bone-pickers to come out here and get hold of it, then? Lot of information here you don’t want getting out into the vulnerable public; likely to cause no end of trouble for your Slayer…”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Ethan…”

“If he doesn’t want to transport it to your shop, Ripper, I’ll just hang about and guard it till you can pop by with that shiny red car of yours to pick us up. There’s a lad…”

“Oh, good Lord…”

“Christ, he’s got you whipped as all hell, Watcher. May as well sign the bloody lease now, innit?” Striking a match on the side of some sort of rough-based idol, Spike lit up a cigarette, and shrugged as he watched Giles and Rayne stare at each other over a stack of skanky-looking books, like a pair of boxers at their corners. Giles already looked beaten, Rayne amused and pleased with the results of the discussion.

Buffy sighed and leaned over to fumble for her invisible weapon from the floor next to the dead demon warlock. If she could get Spike out of here quick, she might even still make it to class on time. “Look. He’s right. We can’t have this stuff floating around, so let’s put some of the worst of it in this car, and Giles, you can come back with yours and pick him up with the rest of it. And you…” And she pointed at Rayne with her deadly, if unseen, pike, as if to skewer him in place. “Don’t get into any trouble with any of it, or I’ll have to come after you, next.”

Rayne lifted his hands above his head—one bearing a small, dark, ragged tome—and smiled with what he probably hoped was winning charm. “Wouldn’t think of it, young lady.”

“Uhuh.” She flicked her eyes to her Watcher. “Keep an eye on him. And all of this crap. Don’t let it get fenced to the wrong people or anything.”

Giles winced. “Right.” With a sigh, he pushed himself to his feet and started peering at the backs of books, flinching here and there as he did so, and passing titles over to Spike. 

“What do I look like, your sodding butler?”

“You heard the lady,” he snapped back without even sparing her vampire a glance.

Spike muttered something about being a bleeding librarian, but stood stolidly while Giles loaded him down with stinky old books.

“You guys can have Anya help you identify all this… other stuff,” Buffy went on, waving her hand around the room.

“Yes, she’d be the right one for it,” Giles agreed vaguely, still absorbed in scanning spines.

“Don’t forget the  _ Syllabary of the Ancients _ , there,” Rayne reminded him lazily, and passed over a book, but there was an odd intensity to his voice as he said it.

Giles went stock-still, as if frozen in amber. “Oh, Christ God,” he whispered. He took the huge, heavy book he was handed with a shaking arm.

Buffy frowned. “Giles, what…”

“Oh, ah…” Giles cleared his throat. “Nothing, Buffy, it’s just…” Opening the book right up to somewhere in the middle, he flipped a few leaves and then stopped and, with a deep breath, very firmly  _ tore out a page.  _ Buffy jumped in shock. She had never once seen Giles remotely damage a book; not even to dog-ear a corner. This sort of deliberate desecration was unheard of! But by the set look on his face, it was nothing she should question; especially when he very quietly set the book down on Spike’s pile, turned away, marched over to the still-sizzling fireplace… and tossed the loose page he held right into the flames with something like venom inscribed all over the lines of his face.

“Well, that’s taken care of, then,” Rayne murmured cheerfully, and turned away to study another book. “There’s just the one on your arm left, now.”

/Oh. Oh, wow…/ The back of Buffy’s neck tingled briefly. /Yeah. Definitely can’t leave any of this stuff just laying around./ The thought of someone else reawakening Eyghon, for instance, was…

“A reminder of things best not repeated, I’d once thought.” Giles’ mouth twisted slightly, though he didn’t look at the other man directly.

Rayne looked unperturbed. “Oh, that why you kept it? Seems a bit of a gamble.” 

/Holla the snark!/ The guy didn’t sound remotely worried.

“Oh, shut it, Ethan,” Giles muttered. Dragging in a deep breath, he lifted his gaze to Spike, nodded, scooped up his own armful of books, and murmured, “That’s enough, I expect. I’ll come back to get the rest and pick up whatever else Ethan has gleaned. He’ll have gone through the entire house with a fine-toothed comb by then.” A faint smile touched his lips. “And found everything remotely of value, no doubt…”

“Glad to know my discernment is appreciated, Ripper.”

Giles didn’t quite look at Rayne, but he did pause briefly before leaving, still smiling slightly. “Stay out of trouble, will you?”

“What on Earth could I manage in such a short span of time? Honestly, my dear, it’s as if you don’t trust me…”

“Please, don’t get me started.”

They were outside in the little carport, stuffing crap into the trunk and the backseat and fitting themselves in around the books when Buffy looked back to see that Giles was still grinning a little around the edges. Shaking her head, she turned her eyes back to the front. “He drives you nuts, doesn’t he?” she asked softly.

In the rearview mirror she saw Giles stare down into his hands. “You seem to have noticed.”

“And you kind of love it.”

Giles hesitated, then… “You must think I’m mad, don’t you Buffy?”

Buffy found herself smiling too as she glanced over at a smirking Spike. “No,” she replied, low and finally, she thought, understanding. “I think I get it.”

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Ethan is just so _damn_ much fun to play with. I have always enjoyed his character way too much. It is more fun than I deserve to actually get to play with his highly innuendo-laden, flirtatious butt and to throw him at Giles and watch him combust. I LOVE IT, because Giles badly needs the shaking up. He needed it at twenty-one, and he needs it even more now. And Ethan will never be anything less than relentless (and charming), and I LOVE him, so having him to add into literally any scene makes me kick my heels in glee like a five-year-old given markers and a stretch of blank wall for a canvas. 


	40. Chapter 40

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is kind of a bridging chapter to the next arc... so not a lot of seriously plotty note happens in it. Which is probably okay, since the last few had a lot happen in them. But take it as the quick breath before the plunge into... well, a LOT, and do as the characters do, if you will; brace yourselves, gather your strength. Things are going to pick up rather rapidly from here on out.
> 
> I crib lines from "The Gift" in this one. So shoot me; I blow my wad a little early on the good Spike lines. I couldn't help it. (I also reworked a Buffy-speech from one of those end-of-S5 episodes, but for the life of me I can't recall which one it's from right now. Y'all will recognize it, though.)

The Box of Gabrok had contained detailed plans for exactly how Glory planned to use ‘the Key’ to get back to her home dimension. Buffy spent most of the ensuing discussion horror-struck. It felt maybe a tad better to note that Giles looked nearly as shellacked as she felt over the idea that their resident, visiting god had come here to bleed Dawn out to open her door home or whatever.   
  
“Why in the name of God do these things always require blood, I wonder,” he muttered, glaring down into the now-empty magickal safe-deposit box. “I mean, by this point it’s so damned standard that we never really question it, but why has it  _ become _ the standard, do you think? It simply is, and don’t you think that odd? Is it just to sound dastardly and infernal, and the most evil of all evil ever to stand about, or is it...”

Spike, who had been markedly silent since they'd opened the box—if you didn't count a low, constant, subsonic sort of snarl—lifted his head at this. His glare had finally found a target. “Bloody hell, Watcher," he exclaimed irritably, "it’s because blood is life. Why do you think we soddin’ eat it? It’s what keeps you going, makes you warm, makes you hard; makes you other than dead.” He scoffed slightly, sounding at the end of his tether. “Course it’s her blood.” And he lit up a cigarette, right there in the middle of the training room; an action Giles didn’t even seem to notice, despite his staring at their resident vampire open-mouthed.

To everyone’s shell-shocked startlement, Faith barked out a laugh. “Who needs college when you got a street-philosopher like this dude around?” she demanded, and chuckled a little more. “I’ll buy that.”

Breaking free from Spike's frustrated regard, Giles rolled his eyes. “Ask him to expound a bit more about how that theory fits in with the history of the medieval Church, and you’ll get a less pithy dissertation…”

“I’ll get a what?”

Spike shot Giles a deadly glare. “Shut your gob, Watcher.” His incisive gaze drifted over to where Buffy sat frozen on her stool, still feeling a little distant, still reeling. “Any road, doesn’t mean we’re gonna allow her to take it,” he went on, quiet and mostly for her ears. “Gonna rip her godly soddin’ head from her shoulders and play ninepins with it, but that goes without sayin’, right, Slayer?”

“Yeah,” Buffy agreed, and fought for equilibrium, for power, for her former certitude. Tough to do when it had been systematically chipped away by multiple meetings with a chick who could beat her with one pinky. God, that was a helpless-making feeling. What could she even _do_ if that bitch ever got a hold of Dawn? Use harsh language? She was just really feeling like her feet had been kicked out from under her right now; like she was trying to get back onto a fighting stance over shifting soil, in the midst of an ongoing earthquake. “Yeah, we’ll…” She pushed herself into a more upright position, locked her eyes with Spike's, seeking strength on his gaze. “Yeah. If she’s even a problem anymore, since that guy sounded like he thought she needed a healing spell or something to even be a threat again. It sounds like Faith’s shot really screwed her up…”

“Which is just badass.” Faith did a little bow. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

Spike’s lips twitched, and he lowered his cigarette to pass by Faith with a nod, closed with Buffy. “I’m gonna go finish this fag, then maybe we can come up with some sort of plan to figure out where the bitch’s been hiding, yeah? Maybe we can finish her off while she’s down, between the three of us, and that way, the Bit won’t ever be in danger.”

Buffy lifted her face for a kiss, nodded when he pulled away. “Alright. I like that plan.” 

He grinned tightly at her as his fingers drifted from her jaw. “Never got to use that bloody great hammer, right? Maybe we’ll get to pummel what’s left of her.”

“That’d be fun.”

“That’s the spirit, love.” And he was out, to hover under the awning out back and finish his smoke, get his head together.

They fell silent for a while, the three in the know who were left. Eventually Faith shrugged. “I’m gonna go work the heavy bag. This whole thing is making me hella anxious.”

Buffy nodded, still feeling kind of hazy. “I might join you in a few.” She needed to do  _ something _ to get back into her body, stat, or she’d be dissociating before too long, and that was never a good look for her. Spike wouldn’t have left her when she was out of it like this if he wasn’t equally off-kilter over this whole Dawn thing, which meant this time around they were too screwed up to help each other, would just mess each other up more. Probably she was feeling his discombobulation along with her own, which just made it worse, and again, there were definitely downsides to having that mutual claim. Not that she regretted it, but…

Faith eyed her for a sec as if checking in to see if she was okay, then stripped off her jean jacket to toss it aside over the peg man, and headed further back to go take on the bag.

Buffy sat for a few more minutes, listening to the sounds of blows and grunts from across the room, and staring at the knife target on the wall without really seeing it. 

Then Giles was there, hands on her shoulders, his voice low but penetrating over the muted noises of Faith’s workout. “We’ll manage, Buffy. We always do. This team is much larger than it has ever been, and has firepower we’ve never previously dreamed of. And how many apocalypses have we taken on by now?”

/Five? Six?/ He had a point, she supposed, and Buffy nodded, grabbing onto the sound of his voice. “Yeah, you’re right. And we have a lot of warning this time. I need to get in the saddle with this thing. It’s just… it’s  _ Dawn _ , you know? She’s my sister. I know they made her, but she’s…” Her eyes found his, rattled and uncertain. “I’ve always stopped these. I’ve always won. But since I sacrificed Angel…” She shook her head, closed her eyes for a sec, feeling overwhelmed as hell. “I loved him so much. But I knew… I was right.” And when she opened them again, she knew Giles could see what she was telling him. “I don’t have that anymore. Not since what that cost me. You know what I mean? I don’t understand this. Why I have to save the world over and over again, if these are my choices. It just strips everything away from me, and I don’t see the point.” She shrugged a little. “I’ve let myself love again—let myself love a  _ vampire  _ again—knowing that if I had to…” 

Giles’ hand squeezed down, hard, on her shoulder, because considering his own love life, he would understand now like he might never have before. “Buffy…”

“That was hard enough,” she admitted, painful over the truth of what she carried every day, loving Spike, though it had become easier since that first agonizing fall. “But if I have to…” She shook her head, looked away. “I can’t do it again. Sineya said death is my gift, remember? Spike said he thought that meant he’s a gift to me, but what if my gift to the world is to just keep killing, and killing, and killing… Killing demons, killing the people I love…”

She was spun around on the stool, and Giles had his hands on both of her shoulders now, to frame her. “No, Buffy. You’re wrong about that. That’s not what it means. You’re not a killer. Spike’s right, and so is the first Slayer. You’re full of love, and I’ll not have that stripped from you. I’ll find a way to keep you from that empty place. I know what it’s like to be stuck there. I was there for twenty-odd years, and I’ll not see you lost there as well, do you hear me? I’ll not have you destroyed like that!” And she was pulled, hard, into his arms. “Not you, Buffy. Not my Slayer.”

She would cry, if she had anything left. Instead she murmured it, dry into the rough tweed of his jacket. “If Dawn dies, Giles… I’m done. I quit. I can’t do it anymore.”

His broad hand stroked the back of her head. “I know it.”

“I can’t…”

“I know. But it won’t. We’ll stop it.” His voice lowered to a whisper. “I’ll stop it. Somehow.”

She tried to pull away, wondering what she was hearing in his voice. It was almost like they were back in the high school library, when he had been ready to go down to the Master in her stead, because she had been sixteen and not ready to die, and her tears had driven him to take action in her place. “Giles…”

“Hush, Buffy,” he answered, soothing. “Spike’s right, you know. We’ll figure it. Just wait and see what comes of this disaster, and we’ll figure something out, alright?”

He sounded so sure; like he had taken on the certainty she had always worn, and was carrying it for her now that she couldn’t bear it for herself right now. And she would take it; take these extra pairs of shoulders, for a moment, until she could get her metaphorical feet back under her again.

***

Buffy was heading out to try to regain her focus with Spike, when she heard the voices. The unlikely combination brought her to a halt. “…Figure it out, I reckon. You just have to take it day by day.”

“I suppose that’s so. I’d imagine if you…” A short pause, in which Ethan Rayne’s rich, cultured voice went curious. “How on Earth do you do it? I've a human soul, if a thoroughly tarnished one. Not to say that having one includes any morals to speak of, but it does lead one to wonder just exactly how a creature who carries only the splintered remainders of a former human soul, and is mostly guided by a demonic one can manage to cleave entirely to the needs not only of a human-souled lover, but a Slayer, to boot.”

Spike hesitated before answering, as well he might. Buffy, hovering with her hand on the doorknob, wondered if Giles could hear this conversation from where he was, but she doubted it. Right now he was way at the other end of the room, offering to train with Faith. He sure was missing an interesting convo. 

“Well, for one,” Spike put in finally, and she could hear the kind of exhale that said he’d held smoke in his dead lungs for about forever while he considered his response, “she’s a special case, yeah? Different deal altogether when you’re partnered up with a sort of a composite being. But as to your situation…” She could just picture his offhand shrug. “You’ve a tough road. But you’ve also history on your side. No doubt you’ll manage alright. You just need to remember why you’re here, keep your eyes on the prize and all that rot.” Another short silence, then, “You’ve earned a fair amount of credit today, don’t mind sayin’. With all of us. Appreciate what you did back there, whatever your motives. Got us information we needed, and I won’t forget it. Neither will the Slayer.” He didn’t tell Rayne, of course, that that was because her kid sister was like his own blood to him by now, but his voice throbbed with sincerity under the gruff offering.

There was a weighted pause, then, “Likely doesn’t make up for some of the things I’ve done in this town that bias your Slayer’s opinions in the other direction, but one hopes that it’s a start.”

/Well, I mean, when you try to assassinate someone…/

Spike probably had his eyes narrowed by now as he studied their newest member of the dubious magickal department. “Well, whatever you’ve done, I’ve done worse, no doubt, than you’ve ever done; and that directly to Buffy. Considering she’s forgiven  _ me _ …”

/Okay, yeah./ Buffy had to admit he had a point, remembering things like the Order of Taraka, among other snafus. /But you’re also sleeping with me, which kind of makes up for a lot. And wow with my double-standard. Jeez, are all these demons in town right about that?/ 

“…C’mon, then, man,” Spike went on, sounding amused, “what’s the worst you’ve managed? Because I know most of what you’ve done is mischief pointed at Rupert, innit?”

Buffy knew what Rayne was going to confess, then; felt it in her lungs. She should probably get out there, save him from being torn limb from limb by a maddened, mated vampire, but somehow she couldn’t quite move as Rayne answered, slow and measured. “Well, once I tied your mate to a table, tattooed the Mark of Eyghon to the back of her neck, removed the one on myself with acid, and offered her up quite literally in exchange for my own life.”

The resounding silence beyond the door sounded like the breathless pause before a bomb landing. /Oh, crap./

Giles really was going to take it hard if Spike maimed his boyfriend, wasn’t he. Was this just about laying everything out on the table so Spike didn’t find out the wrong way, or did Rayne have a death wish?

The low, subterranean growl was resonant enough that Buffy felt it through the door. Not that she needed it. She could feel Spike’s reaction inside her body, turned the knob… “The only reason I’m not killing you right now is she hasn’t yet. Must mean she has a reason. Though, mostly I think she’s mad for humans, think they deserve every bloody chance under the soddin’ sun. But you had better know if you ever lay another hand on her, Joyce, the Bit, any one of me or mine…”

“Understood.”

A short, pointed silence. “You’ve made up for a minuscule bit of that today, maybe. Keep workin’, and I might not rip your throat out, one of these days.” A sharp exhale. “Mostly ‘cause I’ve mebbe done worse in this town…”

He had a point.

“…Dunno how well I can control myself, though. She hasn’t let me kill anyone who’s hurt her yet. Terrible strain on my instincts.”

“Perhaps I should just go in, then, shall I?”

“Maybe best if you do.” Man, Spike’s voice sounded rough.

Buffy stood quietly aside as Ethan Rayne entered the building, aware Spike would smell her there on the other side of the door. She wondered if he’d held himself together because he’d felt her there, or if he’d been too enraged to notice how close she’d been, and had been working so hard mostly because of the brakes instilled over the last year’s close association, or maybe for Giles’ sake or something. 

Rayne just eyed her all glittering as he entered, which… He didn’t look like a guy with a death wish. Maybe it really was just him getting it all out in the open from the top; from his own lips, so it wouldn’t come out later to his detriment. If so... “That was a risky little game,” she informed the sorcerer quietly as he passed, and maybe there was a tiny note of admiration in her voice for his having copped to his rotten judgment in the past. After all, he really did deserve to pay for what he’d done to her back then.

Rayne just watched her for a moment before inclining his head slightly. “It’s done, though,” he pointed out, sounding philosophical. “And for what it’s worth, young lady, I do regret it. I’m a thoroughgoing villain, it’s true, but I do in fact rather like you. For one…” and his eyes flickered over to Giles, whose attention had drifted from Faith’s workout the instant the door had opened to admit him. “…I believe your presence in Ripper’s life has contributed a great deal to his changed attitude. Without that, we would never have had this second chance, which is exceedingly good timing, I’d think, for my part.”

/Good timing? What, do you have cancer or something?/ Buffy frowned at him, worried now. “You’re not dying, are you?” she asked flatly, because no way should Giles have to go into something like that and get his heart broken, after all these years, with blinders on.

Rayne blinked at her for a second, then straightened. “No. Most certainly not.” His lips twitched then. “Prematurely aged a bit, perhaps, in the service of some of my rougher Gods, but not dying by any means.” His gaze went distant for a brief second. “It’s merely that there are certain oaths I have made which may in the end require me to do some very drastic things to avoid leaving, and…” He shook his head, as if dismissing something unimportant. “And, luckily, much of the foregoing set of oaths which would have kept me away have been paid off, so I am able to attempt this at all, in the current moment.”

“Oh. Well… good, I guess?” Buffy answered, confused. Which was it? Was he in danger of having to bail on Giles, or not? Because she may not exactly approve of this guy for her Watcher, but she really didn’t want to see him get his heart broken—or worse—again. The whole thing with Jenny had taught her that much. 

She really had no cope for broken Giles. 

Unfortunately, Rayne didn’t seem disposed to further elucidate, only smiling faintly with his eyes focused like a hawk’s on Giles as he watched for a moment, while Giles worked with Faith; until Giles looked up, met his gaze. Something passed between them, illegible to anyone else, and then Rayne was pivoting to head for the inside door. Giles turned back to Faith, but now he had a faint smile on  _ his _ lips, and man, it was weird to see that kind of unspoken communication between her Watcher and anyone else. Just bizarre.

A little later, as she and Spike were making their excuses and prepping to head out for patrol, Giles called up to his guy as he and Anya wrapped things up and closed up shop. “Come down, now, Ethan, if you will. We’re about to lock up.” He glanced away from the high catwalk-deal where they’d ended up storing all of the most horrible of Doc’s books, with a little sign on the chain that said ‘Keep Out, Private Collection’, both at the top and the bottom of the ladder-thing. “Oh, Tara, if you will, please draw the curtain over that window…”

Tara did so and moved swiftly around the case of crystals to head for the front door. “Willow wanted to know if we were still doing Circle tomorrow?”

“As far as I know, that’s still the plan. Do come on, Ethan…”

A low voice floated down from above, sounding distracted. “No reason you have to hang about for me, Ripper. I can spell the lock shut on my way out.” 

Giles froze, his head turning away from the counter to take in the sight of Rayne, sitting cross-legged up on the ledge, face buried in some book or another. “I beg your pardon?”

“Giles, don’t let him stay!” Anya freaked out from where she was locking up the register. She tucked the deposits bag under her arm and stared in horror. “He might mess with the inventory, or charge that bloodstone, or…”

Giles lifted a hand to silence her and turned to face the ladder, his expression strained. “You’re asking me to trust you to remain behind with a vast store of Dark Magicks books, with the temptation they might accrue for you, on the understanding that you will just toddle on home whenever you become bored with perusing the selection, because you’ve promised not to act on the information within, being that you’re on good behavior?” He sounded as if he didn’t believe a word that came out of his mouth.

Buffy was right there with him. /Oh, hell no./

Something indecipherable sounded deep within Rayne’s voice when he answered, his head rising from his current study to eye Giles blandly. “A very academic study, I assure you, Ripper.” And then he carefully laid aside the book he was holding and tilted his head slightly, as if analyzing his significant other instead. “The fact of the matter is, you either trust me to keep my word, or you don’t. It shouldn’t matter where I am or when, should it.”

Now that was a challenge. Buffy knew a relationship gauntlet thrown when she heard one, and, /Oh, crap./ 

“Bloody hell,” Spike muttered, having come in behind her from the training room. He didn’t ask about the tense atmosphere. He’d probably overheard most of the exchange from the other part of the building. His eyes darted over to Giles, apparently both a little concerned and mildly amused to see where her Watcher would land on this one.

Giles closed his eyes, looking somewhat nauseous, then sighed heavily. “You’re quite correct, Ethan,” he whispered. “Though…” And his eyes cracked open again, and he faced upward once more with a strange look on his face, now. Buffy thought it was a different challenge, one all Giles’ own. An almost crafty look. “I’ve been thinking, ever since we joined hands back at that creature’s house… It’s been a hell of a long time since we’ve done that. I can’t quite get it out of my mind, and I thought…” He trailed off.

A short, pregnant pause seemed to shiver all around the room, then, “Oh, Ripper, you’re a naughty boy, aren’t you, trying to tempt me to give over with promises of other entertainments…”

/Oh, wow…/ 

“Your call,” Giles answered with a shrug, and moved as if to turn away.

The book snapped shut so loudly it reverberated through the store. “Well, I do suppose the collection isn’t going anywhere fast.” Rayne’s footsteps could be heard resonating on the catwalk, then the ladder.

When he reached bottom, Giles was smiling a little and not hiding it, clearly triumphant. “Go and wash your hands, won’t you? No idea where those things have been.”

Rayne snorted indelicately. “One might think you weren’t the same bloke who spent so much time at all those godawful Punk music dives. I myself wouldn’t touch a single thing in any one of them…”

“Shouldn’t have followed me into them then.”

“Touché.”

“Also, that was an exceedingly long time ago.”

“Mmhm. Meet you at the car, Ripper.”

Giles looked way too self-satisfied as he handed Anya the accounts book he held and turned for the front door. “The back door locked, Spike?”

Spike had a brow lifted in clear amusement. “That was deftly done.”

Giles shot him a pointed look. “Been watching Buffy manage you for how long?”   
“Oi!”

Anya came around the counter, patting Giles on the back as she did so, then Spike in his turn. “He’s right. You’re both right. And I applaud the entire scene I just witnessed. Especially the part where it got that man out of my store for the night. You should offer him similar inducement every evening, Giles.”

Giles blushed slightly. 

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Let’s get out of here. C’mon, Spike. It’s patrol o’clock. Demon-democracy and really un-democratic justice, coming right up.”

Spike snorted. “If you think we’re running a democracy, you need to take a political science class, pet.”

Buffy shrugged. “I probably should, considering all the crap I have to do in this town. I’ll put on next semester’s load.” 

Once outside, Buffy twirled her stake and sighed heavily. Faith and Graham had gone back to the hospital to check in on the crazies population before hitting up their side of town. They’d be joining up somewhere around Heatherly Park to relate each other’s patrol experiences before crashing. “Do you think we really have to worry about someone healing Glory and sending her back into the mix?” Buffy asked him anxiously as they paced the streets south toward Willy’s. 

“Wouldn’t doubt it. There’re always idiots in every bunch willing to throw in with the biggest bad in town, tryin’ to get in good with ‘em so they can get a slice of the pie.” A sharp, indigo glance at her. “Probably anyone who wants to shake things up around here, doesn’t like how we’re runnin’ the place…”

“Well, crap.”

“Yeah, well… Like I said, it isn’t a soddin’ democracy. Makes people brassed sometimes.”

Buffy frowned. “Well, I didn’t get to vote on being the Slayer either, for the record.”

His arm fell around her shoulders, pulled her close. “Know you didn’t, pet.”

“Do they think I want to deal with stuff like worrying about whether my…” She cut off before she could say the thing out loud that they weren’t allowed to say, because it was too dangerous. She knew he knew, anyway. /Whether my sister is going to end up dead, because some bitchy hellgod wants to use her blood to open her door or whatever, and she’s like seven times as strong as me, so how can I stop her if.../

Panic swamped her. 

Spike halted, turned to face her, hands planted on her shoulders, fingers prodding and hard enough to give her something real to feel, to rely on. “We’ll figure it, Buffy. I swear it to you.”

She nodded, clinging to the reality of his presence. “I know.”

“Because there’s no other answer. So we’ll do it, and that’s all of it.”

“Right.” It was just… how?

“We’re ahead of the game, anyway. At least we know what she’s plannin’, now. Know more than we did twenty-four hours ago. Forewarned is forearmed, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Even if knowing was a horror.

Spike had apparently gone around some corner and come back with the decision to attempt to cheer her up with weirdness, because he lifted a brow then, tugged her around to face south once more, and said, arm slung back over her shoulder, “Who soddin’ knew that bloke Ethan would end up bein’ so bleedin’ useful.”

Buffy groaned, letting herself be jollied back into a good mood. “What even was that?” And, playing along, she dug her elbow into his ribs. “I heard you after, you know. Trying to give him advice on how to reform himself, so he can keep boinking the do-gooder…”

Spike grunted and shoved a hand between them to rub at his offended ribcage. “Yeah, well, that’s before I heard he’d assaulted you with a tattoo gun and offered you up as sacrifice to some idiot bloody possessing demon who snacks on the dead and unconscious,” he informed her darkly.

“Yeah, that was less than fun,” she admitted. “Though, getting it removed was a lot worse. I had to hide it from Mom… and then hide the scar from her till it healed, and just… ugh.”

Spike snorted. “Yeah, bet that was a trial.” He hesitated briefly, then, “Sod better stay on the right side from now on or I’ll kill him.”

Buffy sighed. “You really are just dying to kill someone who’s hurt me, aren’t you.”

“What gave it away?”

“Oh, jeez…” 

At least the banter over that particular argument kept her thoughts away from worries about a resurgent Glory and her plans for Dawn for the remainder of the night.

***

“‘M just sayin’, the fact that you didn’t even notice…” Spike halted to catch her arm, stepped in front of her before they could go into the store. His eyes bored into hers with a strange intensity. “I can never forget it, yeah? That I’m a monster. Know it, no matter how well I manage to fit in. With your family, your mates, doing the whole song and dance. But that you…” He glanced away, looking pained, and when his gaze came back to hers there was some strange, undefined emotion in it that she couldn’t read either there or in between them, on their bond. “But you treat me like a man, and that’s…”

Buffy frowned, confused. “Bad? Good? I mean, I don’t not know that you’re my vampire, too. I’m not trying to reduce you to just one side of yourself, or…”

Spike looked alarmed, released his hold of her hands to fling one up, halt her words. “No! Hell, I don’t think that you… That you only want me to be…” He halted, as if to reset himself. “I just… The fact that you’ll sometimes completely forget, for instance, that I need an invite…”

“You’re a part of me,” she informed him softly. “You go where I go. I forget sometimes that there’s any force on Earth that can keep you from my side.”

That was it. He was in her arms, or she was in his. It didn’t make much difference. “Bloody hell, woman, what you do to me…”

“Bad?” she asked, grinning now. “Good?”

“Fuck,” he whispered, and dropped his lips to hers. “Maddening. Insane. You make me mental, and I’m so bloody grateful…”

“Well, I’m not sure if that’s flattering, but…”

He shut her up in the best possible way.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Xander’s voice broke into their private world. “There’s no escaping it, anywhere. Giles, acting like a high-schooler inside; I come out here to get some fresh air and escape the insanity, and here you two are, macking like teenagers…”

Buffy pulled reluctantly away to turn her head the three requisite inches to regard her friend. “I resent that, since I had about one-third of the time most people had during actual teenagehood to make out with anyone, because slaying. So what if I’m making up for it now? And also, ugh, is he still being all weird in there?”

Xander made a face. “Well, it’s off and on. Right now it’s off, since the guy’s kind of distracted by those skanky books you guys found at that Doc guy’s place…”

Spike pulled away, looking sour. “Probably should burn the things. Not that I ought to be a proponent for burning books in a general sense. I was too bloody close to the last great book-burning to advocate for that. Terrible idea in most respects, but these…” Catching her eye, he let her see his concern, brewing deep. “Bound to cause trouble, I’ll lay you a wager right now, Slayer.”

Buffy frowned, taking it into due consideration. But the fact of the matter was… “That’s kind of less my call than theirs. You know, the Circle’s. They’re the experts. I’m just, you know… kicky-punchy girl.”

“Bollocks. Everything’s your call, at the meat of it.”

Buffy sighed heavily. “Well, what if I don’t want to be in charge of everything? I mean, what do I really know about magicks? And it’s not like I’m armed to take someone down if they get crazed with some bad spell or something. I mean, if they call up a big bad demon, like those guys did with Eyghon, that’s one thing. I can fight that. But otherwise, that’s why we have a circle of witchy-sorts. To handle the stuff where I’m weak.” She made a face. “It’s why I’m still kinda sad we lost Miss Calendar. She screwed up bad, but she was definitely good with magicks.”

“You and me both,” Xander put in, sounding regretful. “For one thing, if she made it I’m betting Gilles wouldn’t be with this dude now.”

Spike rolled his eyes at Xan. “Don’t be a soddin’ bigot, whelp.”

Xander frowned at him. “Look, I’m not saying it because of the guy thing, though I’m not gonna lie and say it doesn’t wig me a little. I’m just saying, Jenny Calendar was really nice, and sweet, and… cute. You know; sexy in a teacher-ish way, and helpful. I mean, she really did screw up that one time, but she tried to fix it, and other than that, she was… You know, she was in it for the right reasons. Meanwhile, this guy… With the skanky, and the history of badness…” He shot Buffy a glance, shrugged over crossed arms. “It’s just, I’m not sure Buffy needs another big question-mark hanging around the edges of the group, on top of everything else that’s going on.”

He had a point, but… Well, it was a moot one by now. Wasn’t that the word? “Well, she’s dead, and I’ll deal with the whole Ethan Rayne thing.” Buffy shot him a ‘chill out’ look. “Giles loves this guy, or whatever, so we’re gonna have to accept it and hope for the best. And anyway, Miss Calendar’s dead and that’s that, so…”

“This the bird Angelus killed?”

“Yeah.” Buffy found herself wondering, now, how much that whole thing had affected Giles and this whole deal with Rayne, and what would’ve happened if the techno-pagan teacher had lived, and… “I think in a lot of ways, Giles shut down hard after she died. I mean, he went out on a limb with her. He was way shy back then. She was the one who kind of pursued him. And he acted all hard to get about her, which, I kind of wonder now how much of that was because of her being into all the esoteric, witchy stuff…”

Spike looked kind of curious now. “What’d the chit look like?”

“Hm? Oh.” Dragging herself out of her fog of contemplation, Buffy answered vaguely. “Uh, she had dark hair, dark eyes, kind of intense, you know? She sort of just showed up wherever Giles was and cornered him over and over until he… Oh. Oh, man…” /Oh, wow./

Spike smirked a little. “Seems as if Watcher has a bit of a type.”

Xander groaned like someone had hit him between the eyes. Which was fair, since Buffy had just been smacked with the same brick. “Oh my God…” he groaned.

“Oh, jeez,” Buffy agreed, heartily. /No  _ way _ ./

Spike lifted a brow at her as he reached up to open the door. “Bettin’ it messed him up proper, losin’ her to a demon after he broke down and fell for her, considerin’ it sounds like that was his big concern with this Rayne bloke. It’s a right wonder he’s willin’ to give this thing another shot at all.” 

/Oh, wow./ When he put it that way…

Once inside the Magic Box, Buffy focused immediately on where Giles was and what he was doing; a new method of self-preservation. Luckily it seemed he was safely ensconced behind the counter right now, looking over receipts. Anya wasn’t there—probably over at the gallery right now—and Rayne was nowhere in evidence. “Anya coming over later?” Buffy asked Xander as he trailed them in.

“Yeah. I’m gonna bring her over for a while after I run home to put away my tools. Then we’re gonna go have dinner. I just stopped in real quick to see if anything was jumping off…”

“I appreciate that.”

“No charge.”

Tara was just closing down her little soothsayer’s corner, having probably just had her last customer of the day. She pulled a lot of long days now that that was really taking off, doing two or three days of tarot and stuff after class. Wil was helping her wrap up, but her eyes kept drifting away, up toward the off-limits book-rack. Buffy followed her gaze, saw that Ethan Rayne was up there again, sitting cross-legged and poring once more over the offerings there. /Is this gonna be a problem?/ Buffy found herself wondering. /Because if it is, and he starts to fly off the handle because of this Doc-stash…/ God, she really hated to think she’d have to exile him or step on his neck so soon after the big reunion. It would really hurt Giles, and for all her bitching about it, she really was happy for her Watcher. Giles totally deserved to have someone, however weird. It was just… /Why did he have to choose someone so, like, problematic?/

Jonathan entered the room then, from the short hall that led to the basement storage. “I didn’t see any more mugwort.”

“Well, I’ll add it to this week’s order.” Giles raised his voice, turning toward the girls. “Sorry about that. For what it’s worth, I think it’s an excellent idea. I believe we still ought to put it on the docket. Considering all the disrupted sleep going on at the moment in town, a dreamwalking class would be very appropriate. No doubt you’d get any number of attendees, and supplying the materials for dream-pillows sounds a capital addition, so we’ll see to it.”

/Ugh./ The idea that lay-people wanted to learn to dream-walk on purpose sounded un-fun. And also, what was this about a lot of disrupted sleep in town?

“That would be great, Mr. Giles,” Tara answered. “Won’t it, baby?”

“What?” Willow’s attention seemed riveted on the catwalk and Ethan Rayne. “Oh,” she answered, jerking back to the conversation. “Yeah, it would. Yeah. We’ll definitely make it happen. It’ll be fantastic. For sure.” Then she frowned over at Giles. “Why’s the _Nostrans Underground_ in the off-limits section, Giles? I’m just wondering, since if we can keep the Nostrans main text down here, and you have a copy in your apartment that we use all the time in Circle, I don’t understand why we can’t…”

Giles looked taken aback by the question, staring at her until she trailed off. “Well, for one thing, Willow, Nostranus got into some very unseemly studies toward the end of his life. Highly dangerous… ah, deeply unpredictable… Very Dark magicks, by the end of things. Not at all the sort of thing one wants to look into during a regular course of study. Certainly nothing a sane practitioner would want to use. There are far safer, more principled ways to accomplish most anything…”

“But say you needed to get something done quick. To save lives, and the regular way takes too long. You know, because it takes seven to ten steps, and the Underground tells you how to do it in two, because you just have to call on a different…”

“Willow!” Tara exclaimed, sounding shocked.

Willow blinked, turning to her girlfriend, then blushed and shook her head. “Sorry, you’re right. I got carried away. Probably that kind of thing would never happen, anyway, right?” She lowered her gaze away from the hanging platform with its weight of purloined books, face still red and partially obscured by a fall of wavy, flustered-looking hair… but Buffy thought she caught a glimpse of an odd, frustrated look in her friend’s eyes. Maybe even something like jealousy, or calculation, or…

What was going on there? Was she mad that Giles was letting his boyfriend read books she wasn’t getting to look at, or… /He’s probably seen ‘em all before, for one thing, Wil. He’s been looking into creepy stuff like that for years. He’ll either use it or not. But it sounds like you for sure shouldn’t!/

“Oh, hell,” Spike murmured at Buffy’s side. He sounded as concerned as Buffy felt.

There was a low, shifting rustle from up on the catwalk, and then the sound of steps coming down the ladder. “Nostranus isn’t all he’s cracked up to be, anyway, young woman,” Rayne informed them, coming down to join the group. “He liked to think he was the expert, but he really was rather an ill-informed lout. Now, if you wanted to look into someone with a far better grasp of things, you would do better perhaps to find a copy of _The Paracel…”_

“Ethan!”

Rayne lifted an eyebrow at Giles’ snapped exclamation, tilted his head, nodded slightly. “Yes, I suppose I should, in fact, let you find your own way, as I was asked. Never mind what I said.”

A profound silence fell over the room. Everyone in it either exchanged uncomfortable glances or avoided each other’s eyes. Buffy found herself wondering just how big a problem this was going to be, since, out of nowhere, it seemed like there was this big, sudden, mutual understanding that ‘We Should Keep A Handle On Willow Around Magicks’. Like, where did that come from? One minute she was just one of the magick-circle gang, and the next minute everyone was acting like she was some kind of ticking time-bomb. Had there been some big conversation about it that happened in the spellcasting bunch, behind her back, without her knowing it? Because if so, let the Slayer know, much?

Willow, she noticed, was starting to look seriously offended. 

Tara drew closer to her girlfriend, laid a hand on her arm, mouth opened like she was about to say something to alleviate the tension, because she was all about mediation. Before she got the chance, though, the other big mediator in the room jumped in. “So, uh, you guys coming to _Seudat Purim?_ It's tomorrow night…”

“Oh,” Willow answered, looking startled to have been jolted onto such a completely different conversational track. “Is it already…”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s been for a couple of weeks...”

“Oh. Right. Yeah. Uh…” Growing irritation fading in the face of some kind of mysterious embarrassment, Wil blushed a little. “I mean, sure. I could use, you know, being-Jewish-time . I could maybe find something to bring to donate, too…”

“If not, it’s okay. I mean, you’re a starving student…” Jonathan sounded less hesitant now, like he was on safe conversational ground.

Wil, though, still sounded a little like she’d been hit broadside with an unexpected blunt object. “Right. For sure…”

Jonathan glanced away from her, up to where Ethan Rayne was now standing near Giles, murmuring something that was hopefully about magicks, and not something sketchy and sexual. Tough to tell, considering either one could make Giles look that uncomfortable in mixed company. “Hey. Mr. Rayne. You, uh, wanna come? To my family’s _seudat_ _Purim?”_

Rayne’ stilled, cutting off midsentence, and swiveled slowly away from Giles to stare at the short, soft-spoken shopkeep. “You’re inviting me to a holiday meal at your family’s home?”

Jonathan lifted his shoulders and dropped them, as if to say, ‘Well, yeah.’

One of Rayne’s thick brows lifted eloquently. “How on Earth could you possibly know that I'm Jewish?”

Willow broke in at that, apparently fully recovered from her earlier pique. “Jew-dar?” she put in brightly.

Rayne barked a laugh, his expression oddly twisted. “Well, much as I am touched to be invited to such a wholesome event, I would imagine that I am hardly the sort of person…”

Giles, though, was watching this whole conversation with a strange expression on his face; a pained one. At this he interrupted to lay a hand on Rayne’s arm; a move which stilled Rayne instantly. “What would it hurt, Ethan?” he asked softly. “It might in fact proffer something you’ve needed for quite some time.”

The tight face went almost gaunt-looking. “Ripper. Don’t.”

Jonathan watched this exchange for a moment, then spoke again, into the pregnant pause, now encouraging. “Just think about it, okay? I mean, my mother's  _ hamantaschen _ are to die for, and Dad makes pretty decent  _ kreplach _ . And I dunno if your people eat  _ koilitch _ , but we do. It’s a kind of  _ challah _ that’s made into this twisty ring, with raisins and colored candies in it. I think it’s Polish.”

Rayne smiled faintly. “My people would have eaten  _ arany galuska _ as a Purim treat. But then, we originated in Hungary and Romania…”

“Oooh, what’s that?” Willow asked, sounding fascinated, as if polling the differences in Jewish cuisine had sparked the anthropologist in her. “I’ve never heard of…”

“Sort of a dough ball filled with vanilla custard,” Rayne informed her, expression oddly remote, though he still had a faint sort of smirk about his lips. “Rather lovely, actually. Haven’t had one in years.” 

“It sounds really good,” Tara ventured softly.

“It is.” The low voice had gone quiet, as if lost in memory.

“Maybe… you could make it sometime, and share with everyone?”

The quiet invitation pulled Rayne back before he could venture any further openness, and he retreated immediately. “I’ve no real interest in revisiting that portion of my past, actually. Thank you, of course, for the kindness.” His mouth twisted as he said it, his eyes flickering over to Jonathan. “And for the invitation; but I’m afraid I must decline.” He hesitated then. “Though, if you should wish to bring me back some leftovers, I’d not complain…”

Jonathan frowned at this. “Well, I guess you could count as our _mattanot..."_

Rayne interrupted him, looking slightly offended. “I could hardly be considered a charity case. And no doubt, should I miss the food enough, I can make it myself. Cooking is little more complicated than creating a spell. You mix the ingredients, add heat, and  _ et voila _ .”

Jonathan looked troubled. “You wouldn’t be charity, but if you haven’t been to anything Jewish in however long and you’re missing the food… I mean, it’s different when it’s _mishloach manot_ , than when you make it for yourself, right?”

Rayne frowned, glanced over at Giles, and voice harsh, muttered, “I’m in need of some air. See you later, then?” And he was gone before anyone had quite realized what was happening.

The room was still for a moment. “Uh, what was that all about?” Xander asked into the strained silence. 

“Yeah,” Jonathan spoke up again. “Did I, um, say something wrong, or…”

Giles waved a hand. “No, Jonathan, you haven’t. It’s only, the whole thing is a painful subject for Ethan. He was disowned by his mother because of the magicks when he was quite young; just out of school, more or less; which is unfortunate, since it isn’t as if he could control it. He’s always been gifted. I’ve no doubt the ability began to show itself in him at an incredibly young age. And his father… was never pleased with the fact that Ethan was not disposed to give the family grandchildren, and carry on the name, so once he made that fact quite clear, he was cast out entirely. He’s been quite on his own since he left school; has had no contact with any of them.” Troubled eyes flickered to them, and he shrugged faintly, looking down at the floor between his feet. “I’m sure part of him yearns for that sort of inclusion. But however he likes to pretend it doesn't, it hurts him, because it reminds him of what he can’t ever have again, and the family who won’t see him, so…”

“Oh.” Jonathan sounded pained on Ethan’s behalf.

_ “Oh,” _ Willow agreed, even more so. “No  _ wonder _ he’s completely just, you know, thrown himself into, ‘There’s no saving me, I’m just a bad chaos-guy’…”

/Ugh/ Buffy thought, because she didn’t need this kind of insight giving her empathy for a dude like Ethan Rayne.

Off to one side, Xander sounded equally unwilling, his frown sliding away to reveal a kind of regret. “Well, that… sucks. I mean, I for one would kind of like to be disowned by my family; but if you actually wanted ‘em around, and they… Ugh. That really kinda sucks a big fat one.”

Spike made that sound of his that he made whenever he had just gotten some 411 that made a bunch of suppositions slot into place in his brain. “Well, hell. Bloke fits right in, then, doesn’t he, on this bloody Island of Misfit Toys…”

Tara startled them all when she burst out with a sudden tinkle of laughter. She cut off after a second, but her eyes were sparkling. “Sorry. I just… I really loved that movie growing up. Don’t mind me.”

“Okay,” Xander put in, “but which of us is the Charlie-in-the-Box, and which one is the train with square wheels on the caboose? Because for sure I’m the water pistol that squirts jelly, with the number of jelly donuts I eat…”

Buffy felt a laugh bubbling up. “Clearly I’m the bird that swims instead of flies…”

Willow swung around and pointed right at Giles. “Cowboy who rides an ostrich!”

“I  _ beg _ your pardon!”

“Obviously I’m the spotted elephant,” she went on, smiling widely. “Okay, I  _ love _ this.”

Giles stared from one to the other of them, looking confused and vaguely horrified, then shook his head. “I’m going to go check on Ethan. You lot continue your incomprehensible discussion without me.”

He departed, leaving them to break into semi-hysterical laughter behind his back as the door closed.

***

Things went on at a worryingly quiet pace for a couple of days. Giles and Rayne settled down into something that looked like a salvageable rhythm. Nothing came of Rayne’s obsessive study of the books on the upper shelves of the store. Nothing jumped off in town. Despite the careful watch mounted by Faith and Graham, there were no new entrants into the mind-wiped Olympics, over in the mental ward of the hospital. News continued to filter in from LA, sounding positive regarding the steadfastness of the whole ‘Angel visiting Drusilla’ front.

Buffy was starting to freak out, wondering what would go down next, because this wasn’t natural for Sunnydale. Like, yeah, they put down a few stupid little side-endeavors here and there, originating with some of the less savory characters working out of the back of Willy’s or the Fish Tank or wherever, but mostly, nada. It was creepy.

The only mildly concerning thing to occur was when Buffy and Spike were heading up to the apartment to meet with Giles about something and overheard Willow, on her way out of said apartment, chatting with Ethan Rayne, who was on his way in. Apparently he’d been out doing his own thing while the magicks circle met there, which… Buffy kind of wondered how that had been worked out between Giles and his guy, considering that Rayne was definitely, you know, magicks dude. Not that she thought his influence was the best idea in that mix, but it would probably be a bad plan relationship-wise to be like, ‘so, you have to leave while we’re doing this, because I don’t want you there spreading your Chaos vibe all over our Earthy thing’. /Or, maybe they’re chill about it because he isn’t even interested in hanging with a bunch of, like, wannabes and a couple of pretty decent witches, but whose interests are really not up his same alley?/ 

Lucky for Giles, most of the time they did their Circle thing over at the store, not on his home ground, but that time they’d done it at his apartment for whatever reason, and Buffy just couldn’t help thinking that spelled weirdness. /Well, not my relationship, not my fight to have, thank goodness./

Rayne didn’t sound perturbed, though, as he shot the breeze with Wil. “…Don’t see why you oughtn’t, by now, if that’s the only stumbling block.”

“Well, I… I just could never seem to get enough mojo together to turn her back. So she’s, you know, just been a rat since high school.”

/Oh. They’re talking about rat-Amy./ Buffy guessed that was bound to come up, considering how bizarre and… chaotic that whole thing had been, the way it had gone down with Amy just… poof, right in the middle of the, well, witch-burning. And it made for the heck of a story to tell. And Buffy supposed it would weigh on Wil’s mind, that she hadn’t been able to turn Amy back yet. She just hadn’t realized how much, that she’d be willing to turn to Ethan Rayne for advice. /I mean, it’s not like you turned her into the rat, Wil. She did it to herself, so it’s not like it’s on you to turn her back, you know? You’re doing your best for her; keeping her fed, giving her a good home, and, uh…/ Okay, it felt weird, she supposed, and probably Wil had some kind of witchy survivor’s guilt, but still. 

“Well, I for one don’t see why you don’t simply turn her back. I couldn’t imagine how you wouldn’t have in the least as much power as that girl must have had. You’re one of the most naturally talented witches I have ever come across. Why don’t you just command her to return to her natural form?”

Buffy gaped, from her spot on the top step, amazed at the man’s suggestion. Apparently Wil was right there with her, because she was staring at the man. “What, just like that?” And she snapped her fingers, as if to say, ‘I think you’re missing the part where I can’t figure it out’.

“Yes, certainly.” Rayne sounded amused at her stunned tones.

“B…but… It’s not that easy.”

“Surely it is. You simply do it. Exert your not-inconsiderable will, young woman, and  _ voila _ .” 

/Okay, wow. Maybe for you, but Wil’s just a magicks baby, not a twenty-whatever-year veteran who throws magicks around like some kind of…/ 

“But I… I could never have that much power. I’ve  _ tried _ , and…”

Rayne narrowed his eyes at her, all amusement fled. “You absolutely have that much power. It radiates from you. You simply do not believe in yourself. That’s all that’s missing. The moment you do, you’ll turn her back without issue.” The tall man tilted his head to eye her up and down. “Honestly, if I were this Amy girl, I’d be a bit put out that you’ve dithered over it this long, and left her languishing in a rat’s cage.” With a faint smile, he turned away from Wil to head into the apartment, leaving her behind to look both downcast and pensive.

Buffy left Spike behind to hurry to her friend, concerned. “Don’t… I mean, he’s just being… Just because he thinks it’d be so easy for him, doesn’t mean…”

Wil was frowning, though. “He might be right,” she whispered. “If I don’t believe I can do something, I’ll never do it.”

Buffy blinked, thrown by the abrupt curveball. “Wait, what? I thought you said…”

Wil turned to her, eyes suddenly blazing with determination. “I’ve gotta go. See you guys tomorrow?” And she turned to head off with the vaguest genuflection toward a greeting in Spike’s general direction. 

“Wait,” Buffy called after her, “where’s Tara?”

“She didn’t feel good today. Stayed home. See you!”

“O… okay…” Wil was already disappearing around the corner onto the sidewalk as she said it.

“Well, those brakes are bloody well off,” Spike muttered, sounding grim.

“What?” Buffy asked, swinging on her vampire.

“You’ll see,” he answered, and jerked his chin in the direction of their disappearing friend. “All that was holding Red back was her self-image. If she manages to turn rat-girl back, nothing’ll stop her from here on in.”

Buffy took that in for a moment, considering the ramifications. “You mean, the thing you and Anya and Jonathan were ranting about, about how she’s got tons of power but she doesn’t know it, or doesn’t want to believe it, or whatever?” Buffy still had a tough time buying into that whole story.

Spike grunted and turned to head left toward Giles’ door. “Cork’s off the bloody bottle. We’ll have to see if the genie’s a good one or a bad one, yeah?”

He was crazy. Willow couldn’t be a… A bad witch. She was too…  _ good _ . Too sweet and… shy. There was no  _ way _ .

They told Giles about it, of course, while they were there, at which point he turned to favor his live-in with a pointed stare. Rayne only shifted one shoulder and leaned back on the arm of the couch, legs crossed on the other and eyes still scanning the book he was reading, held up over his head. “I didn’t influence her in any direction, Ripper. I merely settled her mind about the girl she’s so concerned she’s failed. She can damned well free the bird from her transmutation, and deep inside she knows it. She’s holding herself back.” He said it lazily, dropped the book to his chest, closed his eyes, and draped an arm over his forehead. “She’s afraid of her own power. You know it and I know it.”

Giles sighed heavily. “Yes; yes, she is,” he answered grimly. “And part of the reason I was glad to see it was because of what I saw in you, when we were younger…”

Rayne didn’t let him finish. “She’s guides here,” he pointed out blandly. “I had none. She’s unlikely to get herself into trouble, or find the wrong sorts as teachers, is she, with so many about to help her keep rails on the thing." He uncovered his eyes to turn them on Giles, an odd, intent look in them. "And she can’t have nearly the same pit of self-loathing, or the same desperate need to prove herself at all costs…”

Giles’ lips flattened to a thin line. “I wouldn’t wager too much on that last one.” His gaze fled to Buffy, briefly, making her wonder just exactly what he meant with that look in his eyes, especially when Spike hissed in a pained kind of way and nodded all thoughtfully.

Oddly, this time when she asked Spike to tell her what that was all about, later, he just waved her off wearily, stripping off his shirt, and told her he’d get into it if it looked to be a problem, and that he was ‘too bloody worn out by all this shite’ to get into it tonight.

It looked like they would get their chance to discuss it the next day, though. When they walked into the Magic Box after her first class, the store was literally abuzz with the news that Willow had de-ratted Amy. Apparently she had just waltzed in fresh from Circle, smiled broadly at Tara, drawn a deep breath, pulled in her power, and just flat-out commanded Amy to stop being a rat. And forgotten to take her out of her cage before she did it, so that when Amy abruptly turned into a human girl again, the whole setup, including clip-together bars and a myriad of multicolored plastic piping filled with rat-feces, had exploded all over the dorm room.

Amy was with them this morning, looking harried and freaked out by all the faces and the talking and the moving and the people. Which, fair, Buffy figured, since, what a mind-trip, being a rat for years, and then suddenly having to figure out how to speak English and deal with a bunch of questions being thrown at you and all that. 

Tara was there too… being strangely silent. Or, even more silent than usual, which was… weird, right? Shouldn’t she be excited for Wil? Though, Wil didn’t seem to be lacking in the pats-on-the-back department. Jonathan and Andrew were impressed enough for everyone. Giles was reserved, but congratulatory toward Amy, welcoming her ‘back to humanity’ and asking her if she needed anything. 

“I don’t know. It’s all so strange,” Amy answered, sounding stunned by all the excitement. “I mean, Willow says the school burnt down? And that Larry turned out to be gay?”

“Totally gay,” Xander chipped in. “Confessed it to my own ears. I dunno how long he got to revel in the good old gay-ness, before he died in the giant graduation bonfire, but…”

“Just, wow. So much went down while I was…”

“Busy?” Buffy put in blandly.

Amy’s eyes came around to land on hers, and wow, did they ever look strange. Jumpy, not entirely human, right now. “Yeah, I guess… Yeah.”

“But you can figure out how to be human again, now,” Jonathan jumped in, all gentle enthusiasm. “I mean, I get how you would be way messed up. But everyone here will help you. They’re all really good people. I tried to kill myself senior year, but Buffy talked me out of it, and afterward, last year I did something really stupid with a glamor, and they still forgave me, and gave me somewhere to be, and helped me to figure my stuff out.”

Amy eyed him for a moment as if trying to place him, then nodded briefly before looking away, back to Willow. “Is Michael…”

“Moved away, along with about a third of the town, when we got attacked by demon bikers last year.”

“Huh. Lame.”

“But we have a really neat magicks circle going here, with Tara and Jonathan and sometimes Anya and Andrew, with Mr. Giles as our teacher…”

Amy’s eyes glanced off of Giles, but her face didn’t change expression at all, which Buffy found kind of wigsome. “Huh,” she said again.

Willow’s bright expression fell slightly. “Well, anyway,” she tried again, “you probably need some time to, uh, relax and… get your bearings…”

“Yeah, I, uh…” Amy looked around her, as if expecting something to materialize to help with that. “I guess I should go see if my dad…”

“Oh. He, um… moved too.” Willow looked worried as she admitted it. “After thinking you, um, ran away, or vanished, or whatever, he spent a bunch of money on PIs looking for you, and then, uh… I guess he went broke and just... left, finally.”

For the first time it really hit Buffy, what a kind of a rough deal Amy Madison had gotten from the deck of life. First, crazy, abusive mother, and then losing her father this way, along with the last few years. She hadn't even graduated; and all because some insane mob had decided to try to burn her at the stake, so she'd done the rat thing to save herself, and then... poof. No way to turn back.   
  
Just, everything, really, had gone wrong for her. Man.

Amy had gone very still, and weirdly silent. After a moment she nodded. “And I guess someone’s probably moved into my old house…”

Wil winced hard. “Yeah. Um, probably. But you, uh, could…”

“No. It’s okay. I have a place I can crash.”

Buffy thought she wasn’t the only one surprised by that. How could Amy have anything or anyone by this point, when she’d been a rat since senior year?

“O…oh, okay, Amy, if you…”

Amy smiled over at Willow, but her expression was weird, and the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I’ll be in touch. I just need a while to get myself figured out.”

“Alright.”

Getting to her feet, Amy headed for the door. “Bye, everyone.” And she was gone that quickly.

“Alrighty-then,” Buffy put into the resounding silence. “So, no more rat-Amy…”

“I thought she’d be happy,” Wil answered, sounding as if she’d been slapped in the face.

“It’s probably a heckuva shock,” Jonathan reminded her quietly. 

“Yeah, like when Han Solo was trapped in the carbonite, and when he was unfrozen he was totally blind, and he only knew Princess Leia by her voice, and Chewie too, but everything was too cold and too bright and too loud, and he had no idea how long he was gone, or if he could trust Lando, and he didn’t know that Luke was really a Jed…” 

“Not now, Andrew,” Xander murmured. “I feel you, but not now. You okay, Wil?”

“Yeah. I… Yeah. I’ll just…” Wil turned to Tara, smiled faintly. “I did do the right thing, didn’t I, baby?”

At this, Tara seemed to come out of her downcast stance. “Oh, Sweetie, you did. She’s just confused, okay? Look. We have class, and then maybe she’ll call you or whatever. You can’t fix everything for everyone, right? Not with magicks. Not with anything. Sometimes things just take time…”

Willow had this weird expression on her face now; a kind of rebellious one, like she thought that Tara was speaking total nonsense, but she nodded a little. “Yeah. I guess,” she answered finally, but she sounded doubtful.

“Let’s go. We’ll make it to Ecology just in time, if we catch the seven bus.”

“Okay.” Slinging her messenger bag over her shoulder, Wil drew in a deep breath and nodded to them all. “Okay.”

Giles frowned, then exhaled hard and called out as they were heading for the door. “It really was very well done, Willow.” He sounded as if the admission pained him, but he did say it.

“Oh.” When Wil turned back, she was beaming. “Thanks, Giles.” 

Tara looked both proud of Wil and a little troubled as she waved and tugged her girlfriend out the door.

The minute they were gone, Giles subsided once more, going back to concerned. Buffy watched him, wondering. “What…”

“She’s… quite a good deal stronger now than she was last year,” he answered, and turned away to head around the counter. “We’ll see what comes of it.”

And wasn’t that weirdly ominous.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
So, yeah. Stuff starting to go pear-shaped a little sooner than anticipated when it comes to our dear witchy friend. But I just have to ride the wave.  
  
Also, if I made any mistakes with my "trying to fit in some actual representation of things Jewish" and someone is in here who is more knowledgeable than I am with my "spent some time hanging out with Jewish friends" (and being kind of a things-Jewish-o-phile) level of knowledge, please know that, A, I meant no offense, and B, I am definitely open to correction. It just drove me right the hell up the wall in the show that there was so little of that with Willow. Like, BONKERS. I was so excited when they did the thing with her putting rocks on Tara's grave, but beyond that and a couple throwaway lines about Santa, there was, like, _nothing,_ and it made me _crazy._ Especially since having her be Jewish was like their only nod toward being anything like remotely 'diverse' on that thing till they threw in a slightly higher level of diversity for an episode or so in the final season (in Southern California. Sorry, I'll stop now).   
  
Anyway, TLDR: please feel free to tell me if I need to fix something with that part!  



	41. Chapter 41

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... why wait? Let's just get this over with now.

Tara seemed sadder and more distracted lately, the more Wil seemed to throw herself into making Amy’s reentry easier. At first Buffy thought maybe she was jealous, but when she decided to step in—after all, Tara had been a pretty good friend to her so far, with the whole supportive during her mom’s illness thing, so it was time for Buffy to step up—Tara disabused her of that notion really fast. “I’m not worried that she’s, I dunno, cheating. It’s not…” Tara looked up at her from under the verges of her falling hair to reveal a strained, painful expression, and very anxious. It was uncomfortable to see how much wind had been stolen from her growing sails by this Amy thing. “I’m… I’m worried, Buffy. She’s acting… not like the Willow I know. And Amy’s aura…” At this last she lifted her head to meet Buffy’s eyes straight-on, and here was the strong, fierce Tara who hid beneath the quiet, shy surface. The fighty one. “I don’t like what I see in her aura. I don’t want that around my Willow.”

/Okay, wow./ Coming from Tara, that was damn near a declaration of war. “What… do you see?” Buffy asked softly, because she absolutely took Tara’s aura-seeing skills seriously. In fact, if she could find a way to get Tara somewhere close to get a look at the crazies, maybe… /Now there’s a thought. Heck, what would it have done for us to have her get a look at Glory?/ 

Too late now, of course, but… 

“I see darkness,” Tara told her, tones bleak. “I see hunger, and rage, and this sort of emotional black hole. Which… and I know you guys said she was abused when she was younger, but if she’s gonna take that out on my girlfriend…”

/Oh, man…/ “She… seems friendly with Wil, at least so far…”

Tara bit her lip. “That’s… almost worse. Because then what’s she up to? What’ll she do to someone she needs, but doesn’t want to need? Someone she considers a friend who betrayed her?”

Buffy couldn’t answer that. 

Meanwhile, Wil seemed just way preoccupied by the whole Amy thing, and really mostly just self-congratulatory about her feat in turning her back. Amy was still acting a little discombobulated and reticent in the group; whenever it was that they saw her, but that wasn’t very often. She seemed to be avoiding them—and, it must be said, Tara—as much as possible. This, unfortunately, also meant that Willow wasn’t around them much, by simple math, as she devoted her time to hanging around helping her old high school friend to transition back to the land of humans. But whenever Amy was around, Buffy thought she saw a few flashes of weirdness that were… 

Well. They were definitely caught and noted. For the record, though, Wil seemed not to track them at all.

“She doesn’t have any other friends,” she told them all once, when Buffy asked why she was throwing herself so heavily into this whole Amy-recovery project. “Everyone she knew is either dead or moved. I’m all she has. I owe it to her to be there for her, you know?”

Meanwhile, as a side-note, Andrew seemed to be totally on a whole new ‘idolizing Ethan Rayne’ kick, which was also problematic, going on and on about how the guy had just told Willow to step up and say words and things had happened. “Wow. He just told her to believe in herself, and she did… this? That’s way beyond cool, you know?”

Andrew was impressionable enough without hero-worshiping Rayne on top of everything else. He practically went any way the wind blew, like that one Queen song.

Also, and possibly a little more worrying, Rayne had been seen talking to Jonathan once or twice as well, since then, which… Jonathan might just have been listening to be polite, or he might also be getting _ ideas _ , and Buffy didn’t need this kind of headache.

Was everything  _ trying _ to spin out of control, right now? Was Ethan Rayne actually attempting to undermine the group from within? Was it accidental, or on purpose? 

What was even happening? 

Buffy was pulling on her boots later that week, preparatory to heading out to meet up with Spike at the crypt, when her dorm door opened without ceremony. “Hello?” she called, pausing mid-pull to feel for a stake, because this was Sunnydale.

“Willow wants to start another Circle,” Tara told her, entering without preamble. She was, it must be noted, practically wringing her hands.

Buffy set down her stake and stared, debating as she did about how exactly to answer that sally. “Another…” she began, mildly confused as to why this was noteworthy.

Tara penetrated a little further inside the room, moved to sit on Wil’s abandoned bed. She looked shaky, freaked. “She’s been acting funny, you know, since the Amy thing? But now she’s all, ‘what would it hurt to make another Circle? Just one more meeting a week, what’s wrong with another magicks club…’”

Buffy frowned her way through that. “Well, I mean, is there anything technically wrong with…”

Tara’s eyes fled up to hers, intense and earnest. “She did it because she knew Giles didn’t want Amy in the other one, and neither did Anya. She wants to be in a Circle with Amy. Heck,  _ I  _ don’t want to be in one with her, but I kind of feel like if she’s going to do this, I should join in just to keep an eye on…” She shook her head; sharp negation. “Except, I don’t want that girl’s energy anywhere  _ near _ mine. She makes my skin crawl.” Her warm, apple-green eyes caught on Buffy’s, filled now with an anxiety that trembled on the edge of outright fear. “But if I tell Wil I don’t want to be involved, who knows what they’ll do. She’s already got Jonathan and Andrew on board; and that bunch, without anybody to put any rails on that runaway train…”

Buffy closed her eyes. A group like that—Wil, Amy, Andrew—would push things to places they should maybe never go. Andrew had no sense of right and wrong, Amy just felt… reckless, Willow… A week, two weeks ago Buffy would’ve thought her old friend incapable of doing anything dark or bad, but now she really wasn’t sure. /And Jonathan’ll go with the group if he’s outvoted./ He was not a strong person. /He rolls with the group dynamic./ It was his greatest weakness. “Well, still, there’s no proof that they’re gonna do… you know. Anything that…”

Tara’s eyes on hers were more than apprehensive. They were verging on terrified. “Buffy, I’ve barely seen her in the last two days. She’s missed class…”

/Okay, that  _ is _ weird./ “Maybe she’s not feeling good…”

_ “Twice _ . Just this week. Once last week…”

/Okay, that’s just not right./ Buffy felt the faint  _ frisson _ of concern building to something worse, deep in her spine. “Is she…”

“It’s like she’s so distracted she barely talks to me anymore when we do see each other. She’s so into this thing with Amy that it’s like she has no room in her brain for anything else; and I know she’s still obsessing about those books up on that shelf in the Magic Box. So finding out that she wants to start a new circle with those guys and Amy…”

/Yeah, I guess this really can’t be good, can it?/ “Is she, um… I mean, how did she act at the last magicks circle with you guys?”

Tara’s eyes on theirs were almost all whites, and her hands were clasped together in front of her now. “She didn’t come.”

The shivery feeling spread to her belly. /Oh, wow./ “Uh, like, at all?”

“No.” Tara’s voice dropped to something so low that Buffy could barely hear it. “And just now, I went to the dorm to look for her, and… I couldn’t find her bag. The one where she keeps her biggest generator crystal. So whatever she’s going to do, it’s something that takes big mojo…”

Buffy closed her eyes briefly. “And you only need four, right?” she heard herself whisper. “To do something big like that?”

“Four to call the Corners,” Tara agreed. “They don’t need me. And with two and two, they’d be balanced.”

Buffy exhaled slowly, to steady herself. “Did you ask her if…”

“If she’d rethink it? The other Circle?” Tara shook her head slightly. “It was the closest we’ve ever come to having a fight. She… accused me of being jealous. I told her not to be stupid, that if she can’t tell when someone who loves her is worried about her, then she’s blind, and I left.” A sharp, pained intake of breath. “I shouldn’t’ve left.”

Buffy reached out, across the gap between beds, touched her hand. “You did what you needed to. Have you, um, talked to Giles yet?”

“Honestly,” Tara informed her in soft, worried tones, “Willow is being all ‘rebellious girl’ right now. She might just go the other direction if Mr. Giles…” Hopeful eyes touched hers. “But you’ve been best friends since you were sixteen, so I thought maybe…”

“Maybe,” Buffy hedged, “but she also thinks I’m an ignorant idiot when it comes to all this magicks stuff—which, she’s kinda right—so I doubt she’ll listen to me if…” /What if I try to talk to her and she just blows me off? She’s so breezy about this stuff these days./ “What about… I mean, Xander… They’ve been besties since kindergarten…”

“Yeah. That was my next stop.”

“Then I think we should tell him now. And Giles. And then we should maybe keep an eye out, see how they all act. That way, if it gets bad, we’ll all be on top of it.” And right then Buffy knew that part of her just simply could not fathom the concept that her friend, her sweet, unassuming friend Willow Rosenberg, good with computers, always hanging in the background, could ever do anything really, truly scary or wrong. /So why freak? Why, really?/

Except, someone as down-to-earth as Tara didn’t usually get this freaked over nothing. And Tara knew Wil better than anyone except maybe Xander, and…

/No. I just can’t deal with this idea. It doesn’t make any sense./

They got their little witch-watch together, of course, in spite of Buffy’s misgivings. Xander, pulled aside from his job-foremanning to discuss the sitch, seemed just as thrown as Buffy was by Tara’s overwhelming worry. “But it’s  _ Wil _ , though. No way she’d get all… out of hand, right? She just wants a separate club, right? To maybe explore some things Giles won’t let her get into in the other group, or…” And then he frowned, as if realizing right then and there how iffy that sounded, with the new books in the store, and the whole ‘off-limits’ thing, and the Amy thing, and the Ethan-Rayne-maybe-influencing-them thing, and all of the rest. 

Spike, of course, had a far more curt response to the news. “Oh, hell,” he muttered upon receipt, and pulled out a cigarette to light up. “Bloody fuck, Red,” he finished, and sucked in smoke, looking all hollow in the cheeks, like he was contemplating a sudden, magickal mass-murder, which, like, chill, Spike. It couldn’t be that dire, right? Just a little mild rebellion from the witchy set?

Except that Giles sounded pretty damn concerned as well, when they brought it to him. “I can’t say I’m surprised. I am disappointed, however.” And he lifted his gaze when Rayne came in from the kitchen. “Luckily, I can start from ground zero with my interrogations. Ethan, what did you discuss with those boys?”

Rayne merely lifted a brow, doing his best to look blameless. “The blond one—Andrew is it?—asked me about my past history with summoning. I told him that was a vocation best left to those with a great deal more experience, if you didn’t want to end up consumed by the proceeds. He looked far more excited by the prospect than I thought the conversation warranted, honestly.” His lips twisted in the faintest sign of derision. “He needs to stop using the magicks as an outlet for his sexuality, that one, and he’ll be the better for it.”

Giles muttered something that involved the words ‘bloody unlikely’ and ‘closeted’, which, hm. Interesting, and also, not really anything Buffy wanted to think about in any great depth.

“The other lad, Jonathan, merely wished to get into deep discussions on the many variations between Sumerian and Babylonian spellwork; a discipline which you and I both know could absorb endless fascinating hours and wander into possibly pointless minutiae. I didn’t see the harm.”

Giles looked like he was trying very hard to find something wrong with that answer, but it was just as clear that he couldn’t. “What about the girls?”

Rayne turned away, moving very deliberately, and set aside his teacup on the bar. “Now, that is an entirely other matter. The new one, Amy… She’s some sort of connection with something Dark. Not sure what, as yet. I tried to suss it out, but couldn’t find it. It’s well-buried; that, or it isn’t hers to begin with. And your girl, Willow?” He shook his head, and to his credit, looked faintly troubled beneath all the blasé “She’s headed for a long road, Ripper. She wants to talk of nothing but those books, and what’s in them. Seems to think you’re hiding some truly spectacular secret to endless power from her, wholly on purpose, to hold her back. She’s becoming more and more frustrated by the party line you’ve quoted her. Frankly I’m unsurprised that she’s elected to create her own illicit magicks circle…”

Giles’ face tightened. “You might’ve told me,” he accused, voice sharp.

“I thought I’d managed to turn her away well enough.”

“Dammit, Ethan… You of all people ought to know that reverse psychology business. The more you say no to someone, the more they want it…”

A blameless little shrug. “Hence why I didn’t say no, the way you have been, so much as tried to make it all sound a rather dull and useless study…”

Giles’ voice turned harsh. “Oh, as if she’s likely to believe it, coming from you.”

The cup was up again, being held to patrician lips. “No way to win with you, is there, Ripper? I told you once. Didn’t think I needed to tell you again; it was never the Dark that drew me on, it was Chaos… and that I’ve long since realized I didn’t need to take anyone down that road with me, once I’d realized what it was doing to me. It was my business and no one else’s, so why would I want to see that happen to anyone else?” Looking down into his cup, he turned it in his fingers, seeming pensive now. “Not especially someone so young and promising. I know how it ends, for one.” And then dark eyes rose, intense in their focus, to strike Giles like penetrating lasers. “And more especially once I’d watched you here, and found you could effectively stand astride that line and manage to touch both sides.” Setting aside the half-drunk cup, he turned away for the hall. “This isn’t my doing, and I’ll thank you not to blame me because the girl’s taking her own dangerous journey.” And he was gone, vanishing around the corner, probably into the bathroom.

Giles’ expression cracked slightly, revealing an agonized expression. 

/Well, crap./ Buffy never thought she would admit it, but it sounded like Rayne at least hadn’t gone out of his way to lure the magicks kids over to the dark side or anything. She could wish maybe he’d handled things better, or given Giles a heads up a while back, that they were dabbling, but it sounded like he wasn’t actively screwing with them or whatever… and maybe she owed him kind of a mental apology. 

Obviously Giles was torn over the same thing. “Do you need to go… deal with that?” she asked her Watcher softly, because she knew what it was like to have that kind of blowout with someone, where you accidentally took out your stress on the person closest when it really wasn’t their fault at all, and… And that was never good, if you left something like that to just simmer till it boiled over.

Giles glanced away, down the hall, then shook his head. “We’ve long since learned that if we row about something, it’s best to wait a bit before coming back to it, or we’ll say things we’ll regret. Terrible things, sometimes.”

/Oh. It’s like that, with you two./ She knew all about  _ that _ , as well.

Then his eyes were back on hers, looking careworn and weary again as they hadn’t since… Well, since Ethan Rayne had come back into his life. “We’ll mount a watch. Keep an eye out for anything untoward. And if any of us has the remotest chance to try to talk some sense into Willow…”

“Oh, yeah,” Xander breathed from where he had sat, silent and with his head in his hands, at the bottom of the stairs this whole time. “For sure.”

***

Jonathan was the first to break with Willow’s impromptu exploratory magicks group. He came back to the fold looking harried and not a little terrified, hunched over and glancing back over his shoulder, to meet with them in the Magic Box and make his confession. “She wanted to try something out of the _Nostrans Underground,”_ he admitted softly. “I only went along because I thought we were just gonna do more magicks. Get more practice in. I didn’t realize she…” He shuddered. “But then she opened that book, and...”

“What happened, Jonathan?” Giles demanded, stern and unforgiving.

Jonathan’s gaze jumped from him to Buffy and back again, jittery as a rabbit in a trap. “Uh, she started doing a chant, her and Amy. And then it was like lightning started to crackle around her, and then… I swear, I’m not making this up, but her hair changed color. It got all dark, and…” He trailed off, going wide-eyed. “And I ran,” he finished, lamely.

“Wait. Her…  _ hair _ changed color?” Xander demanded, sounding floored.

“Oh, bloody hell,” Giles groaned, and off came the glasses.

“I’m guessing that’s bad,” Buffy put in grimly.

Giles lifted his eyes to hers, looking way vulnerable without the glasses in front of them like armor. “We need to put a stop to this, promptly. She’s going down a very dark path…”

“We can try to talk her down,” Xander answered, sounding uncertain, “but, like, if she’s not listening to Tara…”

“Oh, she’ll listen to me,” Tara replied, and hoo-boy, that was a serious tone. Buffy had never heard Tara sound so… in charge, before.

“I can, uh, try to talk to Andrew,” Jonathan added, sounding doubtful. “I mean, if we can even find ‘em. Who knows if they stayed where they were, or…”

“Yeah, he hasn’t been around much lately,” Xander agreed. “Ahn’s been kinda happy about it, but now I’m not so sure it’s a good thing.”

“We need to find ‘em, now,” Buffy cut them off, decided. “Giles, you and Xander are on one team, Tara, you come with me and Spike…”

“If they’re doing something terribly unwise with the magicks, I’d sense it. I could contribute, and that way you’d have a third team.” Ethan Rayne’s voice was a wholly unexpected addition to the spitballing; and there he was, leaning against one of the uprights of the store like he owned the place. Like, where had he even come from, who’d invited him, and, just,  _ really? _ /Like they won’t just think you came along to join them, or…/

/Actually, wait. If they think you were showing up to join them…/ Maybe he could slip in closer or something. “Spike, go with him. Keep him honest…” 

Spike exhaled testily between his teeth, then pushed away from his own pillar. “Right. C’mon, Rayne.” And he glanced over at Buffy. “One of us bringin’ Shorty?”

“Oh, no  _ way _ ,” Jonathan exclaimed, looking like a scared rabbit. “If they… I mean, if I show up and they… They’ll know I squealed, and they’ll…”

She didn’t have time for this. “We don’t need him. Unless you can think of places they’d go?” And Buffy skewered their informant with a  _ look _ . 

“No. I mean, no. The last time they… It was on campus, in an empty lecture hall, but… No.”

“I can think of a few places,” Tara filled in flatly, and turned to lead the way toward the door, all business and raring to give her girlfriend a major dressing-down. Buffy had never seen her like this. She was like, ‘take-charge-girl’ right now. “Buffy,” she elaborated sharply, “you and me can try the Wash. Giles and Xander can check out that one warehouse over by Willy’s, and Spike and Mr. Rayne can look into that one storefront that’s always empty, down by Party Town…”

/Okay with the handing out assignments./ Though, to be fair, Tara was way more likely to guess the witchy haunts of this illicit group than she could. Still, hearing that last had Buffy rolling her eyes in exasperation. “Seriously? They talked about using his old store?” She turned to stare at Rayne. “Did you leave behind any… whatever; magicks vibes in the place they could piggyback on, or…”

Rayne tilted his head briefly as if considering it, then shrugged slightly. “It’s a definite possibility. I was in something of a hurry. I might not have cleansed the place very well.”

“You didn’t,” Giles answered, sounding oddly disappointed in his guy. “The first time, I had to come in behind you and clean up after your mess. And obviously I had to do so again, when you tried to lure Eyghon into the damned place. And then, there was the business with the chocolate…”

“You’ve made your point, Ripper. I was always in rather a hurry, considering you were coming along at any moment, wanting to kick seven grades out of my ass…”

“Sloppy, is what it was, Ethan.” Giles’ voice sounded almost prissy as he said it, which, okay, wow. Was he trying to start a fight?

Rayne lifted a brow, as if he thought the same. “Still. No matter how long it’s been since you practiced magicks regularly, I’d have to say you’re the sloppy one, if you’ve left enough behind for them to use in the shop. And I do recall there was something when I returned after my first endeavor, to use it as a hideaway whilst checking in about…”

Giles shot him a sour look. “Ever so sorry if I don’t spend an enormous amount of time kowtowing to Chaos gods, to know how to evict their…”

Spike groaned and gave Rayne a shove toward the door. “Tiff like a couple of schoolgirls later, innit? Bloody hell!” Shooting Giles a withering look that had the effect of making her Watcher flush in shame, he shook his head and nodded at the door. “C’mon, Rayne. We’re off.” And he glanced over at Buffy as he followed the sorcerer through the door, tones softening slightly. “Let you know, Slayer, ‘f we find anything.”

“Okay. Same.” /Jeez, talk about poking at each other!/ The noisy distraction gone, Buffy turned to her impatient partner and nodded. “We can take the car.” Spike would have left it for them, being as their leg of the search was the most distant from their hub of operations.

“Great,” Tara answered, visibly buzzing with the need to do something, anything. “Let’s go.”

The Wash was, well, a wash… which kind of sucked, because it really had the right ambiance for a magickal hangout, with the whole ‘natural place, under the moon, trees all around’; that kind of vibe. Buffy had been out here all of once, to watch a lot of the stoner kids get down in a huge, massive drum circle back in her first semester of freshman year. The environment had contributed to a feeling of being transported miles away from her former high school life; lifting her into other climes and other times along with the echoes of the at least fifty drums and percussion instruments reverberating up and down the dry arroyo that backed the east side of campus. The smells of creosote bush, agave, and mesquite were the same, now, along with mica and dust and sandstone, and the faintest whiffs of sage, old beer, and used pot… but there was no sign of life amid the bottle- and can-littered ditch. “Well, so much for that.”

“Maybe they might have…”

Buffy’s butt buzzed. She reached for her phone at hyper-speed, yanked it out… and recognized a text from Xander. ‘Nothn here’. 

“Giles and Xander’ve got nothin’ at the warehouse,” she informed Tara, and lifted her phone to call Faith. “I’m not sure why I haven’t before, but Faith could be helping us look…” She made it only halfway to her ear, though, when the phone rang in her hand. 

It was Spike. She already knew it by the sudden surge of feels on the other end of their link. “You got them?”

“Yeah. Get your arse down here, Slayer. I don’t know what the fuck these idiots’ve been doing, but… Just get down here. I’ll tell Watcher and the Boy to come as well.”

Buffy nodded, though he couldn’t see her, alarmed by his tone of voice. “I was thinking we should maybe get Faith in on th…”

“Doubt she can help, but might as well; only get here quick, yeah?” And he ended the call, which, since when did Spike  _ hang up on her? _

Since they had the car, they made it back downtown double-time, and were pulling up to the denuded front of Ethan Rayne’s ex-store within about ten minutes. They were met there by Spike, Giles, Xander, Rayne, and Faith and Graham, since Buffy had apprised them of developments in the interim. “So, what’s the what, B?” she asked as Buffy and Tara piled out of the DeSoto to join the group.

“No idea,” she answered shortly, and turned her gaze on her vampire. “Spike?”

Spike jerked his chin in the direction of the dirty plate glass, then pulled the door open. Apparently the lock had long since been jimmied, because the door opened without difficulty. They followed him in. 

There was nothing to see in the front of the shop but a thin skim of dust and the marks left behind in the floor from some counters that had been pulled when the last attempt at a store here had gone belly-up; a frozen yogurt place, Buffy thought it had been. They remained silent as they followed Spike around a stack of old fruit crates and through the back office door still bearing the remnants of a sticker-logo. She thought the faded legend read, ‘Fruity Fro-yo Blast’. 

The instant they breached the back room, they witnessed a mild disaster. 

The vestiges of what looked like a way large magicks circle were inscribed right on the floor in there, limned in scorch-marks and chalk, and with dripping, crazed candles pasted to the floor by their own remains to mark every corner. They highlighted a bunch of odd-looking, half-rubbed-out sigils at every point of some vast, twisty thing that might have started as a star but didn’t look much like one anymore. 

Off in one corner, a voice could be heard muttering something, over and over again. Buffy turned to take that in, caught a rocking ball of person in the shadows. She had to narrow her eyes and focus for a moment before the figure resolved into Andrew; but a much-altered Andrew.

For one thing, instead of standing around trying to look self-assured in his bumbling way, the guy was curled up, facing the corner with his head in his hands. For another, he was saying something over and over again in a terrified, high-pitched chant that was pretty much incomprehensible, his fingers firmly seated in his ears. 

“Well, hell,” Spike muttered again.

It took a minute, but the mutters finally started to make sense. You just had to figure out where one word ended and the next one started. What Andrew was saying, over and over again without end, was, “Don’tEatMeDon’tEatMeDon’tEatMeI’mSorryDon’tEatMeDon’tEatMeDon’tEatMe _ Please!” _

***

Andrew was still in the corner, begging for something not to eat him. He couldn’t seem to stop. Every time anyone tried to touch him, he flinched away and curled up into a tighter ball, rocking harder. “Don’teatmedon’teatmepleaseI’msorry…”

“Oh, God,” Giles whispered, and all the color had long since drained from his face. 

Rayne, though, just looked vaguely interested. “One wonders what they attempted to bring over,” he mused.

Clearly it must have been something awful, because Andrew looked half out of his mind; like maybe he was going crazy. Like maybe he  _ wanted _ to, if it would make what he’d seen go away.

“Who the hell cares what it was,” Faith put in, stake out and twirling it. “What I wanna know is, were they successful. Because if they were, I’m guessing it’s slay o’clock.”

She had a point. And for the record, Buffy was feeling her sister-Slayer’s grim tone. /We have enough damn demons in Sunnydale without people bringing in vacationers! I for sure should not have to worry about my  _ friends _ contributing extras! We have enough summon-y types among the locals and the out-of-towners with religious issues! Why should someone like  _ Willow _ …/

She was still having a hard time actually believing this was happening. Like, seriously feeling a thin veil of numbness descend, hard time.

/It had to have been Amy’s idea. It  _ had _ to have been…/

“Best get this lad to his mate. Shorty’ll look after him, and then we can get back to goin’ after Red and the other one, and maybe sniffin’ out whatever the bloody hell it was they brought over.” As always, Spike was a mixture of businesslike and oddly gentle when it came to people having a nice mental health break, and wow. That was about the kindest he’d ever sounded in Andrew’s direction. 

“Yeah, I guess… that’s the best plan, for now…” Buffy glanced over at her guy. “Do you smell… Does it seem like they, you know, did?”

He shrugged, heading for their gibbering idiot of a satellite member. “Place is so soddin’ full of magicks, couldn’t smell a demon if it bit me on the arse. Would have to go outside, sniff ‘round the exits to be sure.”

“Okay.” 

They ended up leaving Andrew with a very alarmed Jonathan in Giles’ apartment, where the tiny guy could go into nurturing mode with the tea and cocoa and stuff and try to bring his buddy down from whatever terror-stricken mode he was in, while they all had a quick debrief about what steps to take next. “It’s just, where would she go? I mean, do you think she went somewhere with Amy to… like…” Inspiration failed Buffy. She just had no idea at this point what the heck Willow might do anymore, and that lack of knowledge about her oldest friend in Sunnydale scared her worse than anything else right now. /It’s just, I can’t even imagine her doing some kind of summoning thing in the first place, much less…/

Tara’s face twisted. “I don’t know. I just… I don’t know anymore, but… She’s been acting so weird ever since you guys brought those books back, and I…”

“It’s the rush,” Andrew whispered from where he huddled up next to Jonathan. He was half-cradled, by this point, in the curve of Jonathan’s shoulder, where he was being plied with tea, his eyes closed and his lashes a despondent fan against his cheeks. “She’ll do anything for a rush, since she met that… That guy.”

Tara went all hard. “What guy?” she demanded.

Andrew didn’t even open his eyes, much less quail at her harsh tone. “The one Amy told us about,” he answered listlessly, sounding almost too exhausted to speak. “I went with them the first time, but I freaked out and bailed before I even got past the waiting room. It was too creepy and skanky in there. I didn’t think the rush would be worth it, and there wasn’t even a bathroom, you know? And the people in there were, like, junkies, so I… left. But they were so mad at me, and they teased me so hard, and Amy said I was just as much of a little…” He winced, his finely-drawn face tightening into sorrow. “…A little bitch as Jonathan, and if I wanted to prove I had any guts at all, I could come with them for one more spell, because Rack wouldn’t let them come back again so soon, but Amy knew about this cool summoning, of a thing that would give them almost as much power, if they could catch…” He shuddered. “And they said they’d heard I was good with summonings. S…so I went with them, to help, because I kinda felt like I had to at that point or they’d lose all respect for me, you know? And then, when I found out that Amy wanted to call a… A Sinistra…”

“Oh, good Lord,” Giles groaned. 

“What’s a Sinistra?” Buffy demanded, because if she and Spike and Faith were going to have to go after this thing, best to know what the hell it was.

Giles waved a hand, looking constipated. “Demon mage, from a dimension full of that sort. If you can catch them and trick them out of it, they can impart power…”

Andrew exhaled hard, sounding incredibly shaken. “It was so angry…” he whispered.

“All too likely, considering,” Rayne put in, sounding of all things amused. “Lucky for us all, they much prefer to stay in their own dimension. No doubt it told you all off and went right back home again once you lost control of it, yes?”

“Y…yeah,” Andrew admitted, his voice shaking now, and visible tremors in his hands. “Then they, uh, said they needed something more, and bailed, and I… I couldn’t deal with any more craziness. It got me to break. It said it wanted to eat me. That it would eat me first, if I didn’t let it go, so I did, and…” His voice hit a higher register, cracked, warbled a little as he cut off. “They were so mad at me.  _ She _ was so mad at me. She got all crackly and said she could burn me alive if I didn’t get out of her way, and then they both laughed and just… left.” His eyes cracked open just slightly, to reveal anguished, light green terror. “I’m sorryI’msosorryI’llnevergobackIdon’tevenwanttousemagicksagain…”

Well, apparently their perma-geek hanger-on had very abruptly hit bottom during this whole fiesta. Maybe one good thing to come of what was otherwise turning out to be quite the disaster. /Amy said she’d burn him alive? Just, wow./

“I need to… go. Look for her,” Tara murmured, and headed for the door.

“Wait,” Buffy called after her. “Don’t you want…”

Tara shook her head, eyes haunted on hers. “I just need to… walk.”

Buffy nodded, accepting the call for solitude. If it was her partner who was going off the rails… /If Spike had, like, gone with Dru for a while and was off feeding, or…/ 

Yeah. She’d need time away from everyone, to be not with the staring and the thoughts and the judging and confusion. “O… okay. Well, call if you need… Or if you find…”

“Yeah. Of course.” 

God; the look in her eyes. Betrayal, agony, shock. If Buffy was feeling it, Tara must be… /Yeah, I’d totally be losing it./ 

It was all so abrupt, so insane. /How is this even _real?_ / “How are we gonna find them?” she polled the room as the door closed quietly behind Willow’s distraught girlfriend. “Deal with this, if they’re, like, completely going off the rails like this? Summoning demons, and…” 

“And have found some sort of dealer, as well,” Rayne put in, sounding as if he was discussing the price of eggs. 

Buffy blinked, taken aback. “A what?”

Rayne looked surprised at her confusion. “Surely you all heard the same testimony I did. This Amy chit introduced your friend to a Dark Magicks dealer, who’s been offering them a high. Though, what’s in it for him is debatable. Do they have access to any money, or a treasure of any kind, or…”

Spike frowned fitfully. “Not unless they’ve dug back into my hoard. Which, I suppose they might be able to manage better than I can, with magicks. Shifting the earth away from a soddin’ sinkhole is too much of a bloody undertaking to do all over again, otherwise, though I’m not chuffed at the idea of sharing with a load of addicts…”

Buffy rolled her eyes at him. “So way not the thing to be concerned about right now.”

He shrugged it off. “Wasn’t, really. Just sayin’. Only treasure goin’ begging ‘round town, that I know of. Unless you’ve found any others you aren’t tellin’ me about?”

Buffy didn’t dignify that with a response. 

“I always wondered if Willow was gonna go off the deep end,” Faith put in, sounding thoughtful. “I always knew the girl had it in her to go bad; always knew if she ever did, she’d go big or go home, you know? I figured, if she ever shook off the shy-girl routine and really went for it, she’d maybe even put me to shame.” At Buffy’s amazed look she just shrugged over her crossed arms. “It’s always the quiet ones, B. Thought you knew that.”

/Okay, but  _ Willow? _ /

Xander was just shaking his head where it hung down between his shoulders. He’d been studying the rugs basically since they got back and Andrew had started talking. “I just don’t  _ get _ it. I mean, I just  _ don’t _ . I mean, it’s Wil.” His head rose then. “You know, it’s  _ Wil _ .”

“I know, Xan,” Buffy answered his tremulous query with the same, soft bewilderment. “I don’t get it either.”

“She’s had to play second fiddle all her life,” Spike answered their confusion with flat certitude. “She’s been teased and put down and forced to be meek and quiet and to never feel her own potency, her rage. She’s cutting loose now, really getting a taste for her own brand of wrath, for the power that fury brings her. She could more’n likely burn up the world with the strength of what she’s held back her whole life.” Shaking his head, he flicked at the head of the newest lighter he’d found somewhere. “Faith’s right. It’s always the quiet ones you’ve got to look out for.” He gave Buffy a pointed look, one that said without words, ‘I ought to know.’ Which, right. He had a point.

What a weird thing to consider, that Spike liked Willow partially because he saw himself in her.

“Good Lord,” Giles muttered again, and threw himself down in the nearest seat. Pulling off his glasses, he dangled them by one earpiece and let his arms hang off the edges of the armrests. “Damn. I never wanted this for her. I thought if I just… left her to piece her way slowly, she’d find her way without…”

He was interrupted by a sharp guffaw from his live-in. “Ripper, for God’s sake, you know better. That’s the surest road to ending up precisely where you don’t want her to land.”

Giles’ closed eyes popped open, and he sighed as he gazed on his paramour with weary cynicism. “I did try to guide her. Gently, with the circle…”

“Yes, well, it seems she’s in full rebellion against any guides at the moment…”

“You’d noticed, had you?”

Wow, who knew Giles could be so snarky. 

Buffy kind of thought he was hurt, though. He’d kind of thought of Wil as a sort of protégé of things Watcher-y. To have her go down the path down which he’d lost Ethan Rayne was probably incredibly painful, and… /Oh, man, did I just have that thought? Because there is no way  _ Willow _ , of all people, is gonna end up like Ethan Rayne! No way in the universe!/ 

Stewing in those thoughts for too long was a sure road to insanity. After a half-hour or so Buffy really couldn’t take it. Sitting still was just not her forte. After all, it wasn’t like Wil was going to come back to them, in her current state of mind. They needed to be out looking. /Needle in a haystack, much?/ But still better than just sitting here, waiting for Tara to get back and wondering… “Spike!” she called, and, revitalized, turned on her heel to head out the door. Maybe if they went back to campus, or…

“Right, then,” Spike ground out, and followed her toward the exit. 

“Back on it?” Faith drawled, and pushed herself away from the wall to trail them, a silent Graham in her wake, because he was totally her shadow. 

Xander looked around him for a second as if seeking guidance, frowned over at Jonathan and the shuddering remains of Andrew, then nodded to himself and fell in behind the two Slayers and their party. 

“I should perhaps remain behind for a bit and play communications hub, do you think?” Giles called after them. 

“Sure, whatever,” Buffy answered shortly. It didn’t really matter. One way or another, they were going to have to find Wil. The method wasn’t the most important part of the equation, as long as they got results. 

They had barely made it out of the front door when Tara accosted them. “Have any of you found Willow yet?” she asked, and her voice sounded frantic.

Buffy glanced behind her at the trailing party in the doorway, turned her gaze back on the anxious girl before her. “No, we were just gonna head out and try again. Why, did something worse…” Buffy caught an actual glimpse of Tara’s face in the faint light from the dim overhead light, and woah, she really looked not-okay. “What’s wrong, Tara? You sound…” She sounded scared, actually; enough so that Buffy reached out, caught her arm, concerned.

Tara was wild-eyed in the gloaming. “I found her. For a second. And the way she was acting…” She shook her head, and now there were tears standing in her eyes. “She was acting even weirder than... I’ve never heard her like that.”

/Oh, man./ “What was she… Was Amy…”

Tara nodded, looking down at the ground. “Yeah. They were both there. But Amy just laughed… and then Wil just laughed… and then they just… took off. She told me, ‘Everything’s  _ fine _ , baby’… and then just… left.” 

/Like it’s no big deal that they summoned a thing that left Andrew a gibbering wreck, and Tara’s barely seen her in days, and… What  _ even? _ / It was so not like Wil; not even a little, and Buffy nodded to show she got it. Felt Spike step a little closer to her, a bolstering presence in the dark. 

Behind them, she could hear Xander muttering something about giving that girl a talking to. /She sounds like she could use it. What are you  _ doing _ , Wil?/ It was like she had no consideration right now for her girlfriend, her friends… “Okay, well… where was this?”

“In the dorm. She came back, grabbed some herbs and stuff, and then just…”

Tara, sitting alone in the dark in the room where she lived with Willow, praying for her girlfriend to come to her senses and come back, only to have a reunion like  _ that _ … /Oh wow./ Buffy shot a quick glance up at Spike, who nodded. Another behind her, caught Faith’s nod. “Alright, c’mon,” she told Tara, and caught her hand. “Let’s go get Giles and see if we can find her.”

** TBC…  
**   
  
  
  
(By this point in any Willow-centric arc, you're basically just going *facepalm*, oh well... *popcorn*. Even if you're the one writing it.)  
  



	42. Chapter 42

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... I am careering right into Darth Willow right now and getting it the hell over with a season early, so as to avoid having to deal with it later. Mostly because having Ethan around makes it damn fun (and really easy) to bring up this stuff (like certain elements in town) and just throw them into the blender and see what comes out. And man, am I ever enjoying the results.
> 
> Or, well... I was until the chapter after this one, anyway. But we'll leave those misgivings for later and stick to my hopefully entertaining and definitely swift reckoning for our wayward witch.

To Buffy’s surprise, Giles went into a weirdly interrogate-y mode when Tara passed on her story. “Did she say anything else while she was in your dormitory, Tara? Anything at all?”

Tara looked taken aback. “Um, not really. Oh! Except that she was mad she was out of hellebore again…”

“Then she’ll go to the shop. Perhaps we can catch them there.” Giles looked seriously grim as he led the way back out of the apartment.

Buffy was faintly surprised when Rayne trailed them down to the curb to pile into the two available cars, but whatever. At this point she honestly didn’t care. They were on the go, had been for what seemed like forever tonight. He could tag along if he wanted to. 

When they got to the store, they could all hear the sounds of movement within. Faint bumps and crashes, giggling… No lights on, though. When Giles opened the door, neither girl even looked up for a moment, and when they did, Willow looked oddly unfocused. “Oh. Hey. It’s the magicks police,” she kind of mumbled, and dropped the lid on one of the bulk herb containers to wander over to the next. She lifted that lid, shook her head a little, looking unsteady, then glanced over to where Amy stood digging through the loose crystals. “Better hurry. Daddy’s home.”

/Okay, hello snide!/ 

Amy giggled as if Wil had just said something incredibly hilarious. The rocks she was holding tinkled through her fingers, back into the case below. 

Giles winced at the faint shattering noise. “I’ll thank you to please stop pawing through my saleable goods...”

Willow tilted her head, looking mazy, though she kept the lid open on the latest herb deal where she stood. “Just need a little hellebore, Giles, and some mugwort…” Then she frowned. “None in here, though.”

“It’s on order, if you’ll remember, since the last bit was used up on those dream-pillow packets, for the class you never scheduled.”

Buffy winced. /Ouch./ Man, Giles could cram on the disappointment, when he wanted to; a fact with which Buffy was all too personally familiar.

“It certainly won’t last long,” he went on, “if you come in here and attempt to make use of it for free.” 

/Eee./ Man, he sounded miffed. Almost forbidding.

“Oh, calm  _ down _ , Giles. Giles, GileseyGiles… So stuffy. It’s just leaves. Just funny-smelling leaves… We can get you more tomorrow. I’ll grab some eucalyptus and turn it into the ones you want. It’s just a transmutation. Like lead into gold, only with plants…” Willow sounded way high, and way inconsiderate. Like nothing mattered, nothing could impact her. Like nothing at all registered with her right now. 

“Oh,  _ man _ ,” Xander could be heard to mutter, horror lacing his voice at how out of it his best friend sounded right now.

Out of nowhere, Rayne stepped around the irritated Watcher to stand right in front of Willow. Buffy opened her mouth to protest, but before she could get any words out he’d caught Wil’s chin in his hand. And then… Well, by then, something in his expression forestalled her; something concerned, something flashing in his eyes as he scanned Wil’s face. 

When he dropped her chin, he did so with an abruptness that looked almost like distaste, and stepped back looking as upset as she had ever seen him. “Well, this isn’t at all appropriate.”

/Wait. What’s not… appropriate?/ As far as Buffy could tell, nothing about this whole thing was ‘appropriate’. Not that Ethan Rayne knew from appropriate, but...

Willow was the one to giggle this time, though it came out slow and kind of druggy-sounding.

Giles frowned, staring at a distracted-looking Rayne. “What is it, Ethan?” he demanded, sharp and fitful-sounding.

The tall figure half-turned to them in the low light, his expression tight. “She’s being used,” Rayne informed them flatly. “I see it now. Someone’s pumping up her natural abilities; using her as a conduit. Someone who hasn’t all that much natural ability himself, but who’s learned how to be a vampire of sorts when it comes to magicks. He’ll be able to teach others to open up, surrender entirely, and then he causes them to crank open all the valves so that the power’s a torrent.” The distaste in the man’s voice turned to outright disgust. “Once he’s done that, he’ll be free to suck away at them like a teat to get his own rush. But eventually it burns them out, to have so much running through them; because they keep coming back, don’t they, to get that high, since they can’t get it to that extent on their own. It takes someone else pulling at it to bring it to that peak. So they’ll keep coming back and keep coming back…” His eyes turned back to regard the dazed-looking girls hovering over the herbs, his mouth a flat line of regret. “Till everything that makes them unique, bright lights in the world is severed; burnt away.” 

“Oh, Goddess…” Tara whispered, and there was a wealth of agony in her voice for the recognition that her girlfriend was… Well, a magicks junkie. 

/God, Willow’s a magicks junkie./ Buffy had no idea how to process what she was hearing for a second, but when she did… /That’s just… How does that even…/ It was such a weird thought that it was almost unfathomable. And yet, it explained why Willow would go along with Amy when she’d suggested summoning a demon who would give them more magicks-vibes or whatever, for even a short period of time. Because otherwise Buffy could come up with not one other explanation for Willow Rosenberg ever participating in any sort of demon-summoning. Like, ever.

What was interesting about all this, though, was the level of antipathy that had vibrated in Rayne’s voice during his recitation. Considering his history, you’d think… “You sound like you don’t like this person.”

Rayne’s stance didn’t alter a whit. “I’m vastly offended. This bounder has no real ability of his own except to use others to get his end away, and so he wastes people with far greater potential than he’ll ever have, one after the other, just to get his fix. I have no use for such a bloody waste of skin.” The man squatted before Willow then, smiled a little, voice oddly gentle. “Where is he, then, young woman? The man who gave you the nice rush?”

Willow smiled mazily at him. “Not supposed to tell.”

/Well, crap./

Rayne’s eyes flickered over to where Amy stood, playing with the crystals and, probably, based on the cleansing rituals Buffy had seen the girls do before with Giles, rubbing her icky mojo all over them. “You showed her how to find this person, I understand?”

Amy smiled a little into her hands, spread her fingers. The sharp, shining minerals  _ tinked _ away, down into their receptacle, one by one, while Giles flinched at every impact. “Before I was a rat, he gave me power. Showed me how to find all of mine. Me and Michael; we used to go… I needed to be all charged up in case the parents did something to us. And I was just in time, wasn’t I?” Her eyes rose then, pupils blown wide like a cat’s in the dark and not all that cognizant of her surroundings.  _ Man _ , she looked high. “I would’ve never gotten away if I wasn’t juiced. I wouldn’t have had the power. But he gives you the power.” She hummed slightly, sounding lilting, like she was in love. “And he says I taste like an autumn wind…”

Rayne tilted his head slightly. “How did you find him?” he asked, curious and light.

Amy’s eyes snapped to his, sudden and suspicious. “Can’t tell you that. You’re not invited.”

/Well, crap./ Buffy opened her mouth to try something else, but the ex-rat was already wandering away, fingers playing in front of her eyes like she was watching them make pretty pictures or something.

“Like watching chits on acid at a soddin’ music festival,” Spike groused, irritation filling his voice for the delay.

“We’ll have to follow them when they come down and need another fix,” Rayne put in, and nodded at Faith. “Would you and your young gentleman be willing to guard the rear door? They’re full of magicks right now, won’t need to go back for several hours. Once the high recedes, however...” He shrugged deprecatingly. “It wouldn’t do for either of them to escape without someone there to sound an alarm.”

“Goddess…” Tara moaned, soft and pained.

“Can’t you sense where this guy is?” Buffy snapped, feeling way too behind the times. If there was some kind of dangerous warlock in town getting kids all juiced up on Dark Magicks, they should’ve known about it a long time ago. The bastard needed to be put out of business like yesterday!

Rayne shook his head grimly. “Not unless I know what part of town it’s in. It’ll move about, well-glamored. Since I threw Doc over to you lot the moment I set foot in town, I won’t be permitted to feel it.” 

Buffy swiveled to eye her vampire. “Can’t you…”

He frowned pensively. “Might have, once, Big Bad an’ all. When I was still equivocal. Too much of a white-hat now, though. Never even heard a rumor about it. Obviously the lot’ve kept it from me…” And that omission definitely rankled him, Master that he was. “Could wander about trying to feel the vibe, but he’s right. Without the right location to start from, it’d be a needle in a haystack.”

“Yes, well,” Giles answered, and moved to turn the lock on the front door, “That being said, I suggest we station ourselves at the exits and wait them out. No doubt eventually they’ll come down and want another hit of this… character’s special touch. When they do, we can follow them to where he hides.”

That, essentially, became their plan of action. It was a long-game one, too, since the high the girls got from their dealer or whatever seemed to linger for a while. Luckily, Giles had stocked a snack-cabinet for Buffy and Faith, back in the training room, because he knew Slayers. They all shared the proceeds, on the unspoken understanding that eventually they’d refill it. Spike was the only one to demur, saying if he was going to bother to resort to human food to have something to do with his mouth, he’d prefer a blooming onion or some whiskey, thank you very much (at which point Giles opened up a bottle of something unlabeled he had hidden behind a statuette under the counter, and shared it out between himself, Spike, Faith, and Rayne). 

They did shifts on the doors. The girls wandered mazily around the shop, playing with magicks stuff and trying to do spells to keep the high going. No one got in their way, really, or interacted with them too much, except to incidentally mess things up for them so that said high could keep wearing down, because that was the point. The faster it did, after all, the sooner they would, according to Rayne’s theory, wander off to their magicks-dealer for another ‘hit’, or whatever. 

Mostly it was about waiting them out, which made it very much like mounting a shift over werewolves; just sitting around watching for that moment when they would either turn, or turn back, or… And how weird was it that they were doing this now, with Willow?

Tara tried a couple of times to talk with Wil, but she was so out of it she just smiled and brushed her fingers on her girlfriend’s face and said things like, “I’m  _ fine _ , baby. I just need a little spell. Just a little spell, and I’ll be great,” and never noticed the way Tara flinched from the feel of her aura or whatever, which was apparently way soiled or something.

“I’m going to have to energetically cleanse everything in the store,” Giles muttered at one point.

“Good exercise for the rest of your circle,” Rayne answered blandly. “The ones who aren’t drug addicts, any road.”

“Yes, thank you, Ethan, for the reminder that half my students have gone off the wagon. I very much enjoy being told that I’m a terrible disappointment as a teacher…”

/Eee./ Obviously, tensions were high.

Rayne turned to regard Giles for a moment, then shook his head once in negation. “I never meant it like that, Ripper. Goodness. You’d think you were touchy about the subject.” And then, reaching out, he laid a hand lightly over the top of the one Giles had sitting on the counter, next to his now half-empty bottle of alcohol. “My dear, you must know that this was bound to happen, whether it occurred now, or in six months, or a year. You’re really very lucky that when it did happen, you were close enough to the situation to act upon it swiftly and with dispatch. That’s what being a teacher is for in such circumstances; not keeping things from happening that  _ will _ always happen in these situations. The girl has the abilities she has. It follows that she must needs explore all avenues, in order to learn what not to do. She’s too strong to believe you when you simply  _ tell _ her not to do it, it’s not safe, and all that rigmarole. She’s the sort who learns by doing before she’ll truly understand.” A faint quirk touched Rayne’s lips, and his eyes took on that intense light that said he was driving a point home. “But you also know, and know it quite well, from personal experience, that once bitten…”

Giles closed his eyes, exhaled softly, nodded. “Yes, well… I’d just hoped that she wouldn’t have to… To endure…”

“You know better than that, Ripper.”

After a moment, he nodded. “I suppose I do, at that.”

“Well, then; we’ll see to it she doesn’t hurt herself or others on her way to learning the worst of it, and get her back on her feet quickly.” There followed the shortest possible hitch in Rayne’s otherwise smooth, self-assured delivery. Buffy would have missed it if she hadn’t seen the way Giles jerked to attention, eyes sharp on the other man’s face. “See to it she doesn’t have to watch someone die… or spend twenty years flailing about insisting that it’s the only right road for her, because no one’s left around her who loves her enough for her to have anything to come back to.”

Giles’ expression crumpled. “Oh, bloody hell, Ethan…” he whispered.

/Oh, wow…/ Buffy turned away, back toward her station beside Spike at the front door, to give them their privacy as their foreheads fell together in silent communion.

It took almost a full twenty-four hours for the girls to come down; an insanely long period of dull endlessness that included, eventually, poker, speed, go fish, spades, gin, hearts, rummy, bullshit, and just about everything else you could possibly do with a worn deck of cards, courtesy of Spike, who had one in one duster pocket (at one point Faith suggested strip poker as a way of keeping them all from dying of boredom. Buffy countered that offer with sleep-shifts instead, because, just, no). The vigil-slash-card-game-extravaganza was sporadically punctuated with comings and goings. (Graham, departing to pull his shift on base, returning wiped out, but bearing fast food and coffee, before crashing practically standing up, leaning on a pillar next to Faith, because he was apparently quite the keeper. He didn’t even need to be in this. At this point Buffy was ready to admit that former Initiative or no, he was a hell of a guy.) It was also spotted here and there with calling people to let everyone know where they were. (Eventually Anya showed up bearing gifts, in that she brought food, like a hero.) 

She even stayed around long enough to inform them all that if this magicks-sucking person was who she thought he was, then once upon a time he’d had his glamor over the area down near Industrial. “But it hasn’t been there since you pillaged Doc’s house. He moved the entire operation after that…”

“Why didn’t you tell us about this guy, if you knew about him, Anya?” Buffy demanded, horrified by the presence of such a monster in her town.

Anya eyed her for a moment, looking confused. “He’s human, Buffy,” she answered finally, sounding confused. “I didn’t think he fell under your rubric.”

Giles rounded on her then. “You didn’t think he fell under mine?”

Anya shrugged off the accusation. “He’s clearing the town of bottom-feeders with at best minor gifts, who would otherwise more than likely cause trouble for Buffy, with their petty talents. Instead they spend all their time distracted with worrying about when they’ll get their next high. It seemed straightforward enough an economy to me.”

God, Anya was terrifyingly practical. 

Mom worried, when they called her. Of course, she asked if they needed anything--Buffy and Spike both insisted she stay away, because no way she should get involved in this--at which point she kindy offered to take Anya’s shift at the gallery. Anya said she could either work, or stay, depending on need, though she was clearly offended that the Magic Box had to remain closed for the day to serve as a makeshift cage. She then commenced to bitch the entire time about all the lost sales the girls were costing them, leading Buffy to reflect that at least, thank goodness, it was Saturday, and she didn’t have to miss out on yet another couple of classes because of a slaying emergency. Though in this case, it was just as much a friend emergency. But even if it weren’t, what could she tell the professors? ‘My friend was so high I had to stay with her till she came down, then use her as bait and chase her to where her dealer hangs out so I could kick his ass’?

Her teachers already thought her excuses were running thin as it was.

Eventually it was nightfall again. It was also blaringly obvious that the girls were finally beginning to come down. They were getting antsy as hell each time the group on shift did stuff like knock the magicks accoutrements out of their hands before they could cook up another spell in the middle of the shop floor, or step in front of them before they could sneak up the ladder to grab another off-limits book full of dark magicks evil, or interrupt whatever else they could think up to stave off the inevitable comedown. Eventually they went from mazy and hazy to jittering and bitchy and snapping at everyone. 

Toward the end they started to act weird and sneaky. Everyone pretended to be too tired to notice; to miss it when Wil, whispering with Amy off in the corner, by the magazine rack, tugged her new bestie off toward the door that led through the training room. 

They were going. Skulking off. “Ready?” Buffy asked Tara, sotto.

“Ready,” she whispered back, strained but determined. The trace she had put on her distracted girlfriend was prepped. They wouldn’t lose the girls, who were hopefully too drained by their sudden crash to notice, or at the least too drained to be able to throw off the spell Tara would use to feel them. 

“If they do, Spike will trail ‘em by scent,” Buffy put in.

“No problem,” Spike agreed. “Gonna get this bastard. Hiding in my town, everyone lyin’ to me…” The flood of irritation from her guy was enough to make Buffy’s hackles rise in sympathetic annoyance, and oh, he was going down, this dealer-guy.

“I’ll hold him down for you, Blondie,” Faith put in as she strutted next to them. 

“You and me both,” Xander agreed, sounding forbidding. He was taking this whole ‘get Willow high’ thing as personally as Tara was, for obvious reasons. 

Tara just strode along a few feet behind their oblivious charges, silent and sick-looking, but determined.

Buffy got why they were all in this, of course. All of them but Ethan Rayne. “What I don’t get is, why do you even care? Really.” She asked it quietly, but it was an intent question, and he answered it with as much sobriety as she’d implied. 

“Young woman,” he informed her in firm, if low, tones, “magicks are my specialty. I dislike seeing them used incorrectly, by talentless hacks piggybacking off greater minds. Such creatures lack style.” His mouth twisted, as if the very thought soured his mouth. “As well…” A short pause, as if he was choosing his words with care. Then, “Assisting you at least this gives me the opportunity to use my skillset, instead of sitting about doing nothing whatever, and being, in effect, a kept man.”

/A kept… Oh. Wow. Okay, new worry./ If Rayne was starting to get bored, living with Giles and not causing trouble, that way lay ruin. “Are you…”

Before she could finish, Spike broke in, his voice filled with something that sounded like recognition. “Get the chance to do something useful with your talents, is it? Instead of just sitting about at loose ends?”

Rayne turned slightly in mid-step to eye her vampire with an expression on his face that looked like rueful acknowledgment. “And in this, I rather think you need me.”

Spike considered this reply, gave a reluctant, if sharp, nod. “No doubt.”

To one side of them, Giles looked thoughtful. Buffy was right there with him. Was Spike feeling this guy right now? She remembered back when he had been all super-stoked that he could hit back, even if it had been just other demons. It had been part of what had made it easier for him to be on her side. Not that he hadn’t been, by then, pretty much one hundred percent on her side, after the stuff that had gone down in the motel, but… well. 

Okay; it wasn’t just vampires and bad old magicians who had that issue. Having a place to put your hungers and your talents and abilities so you weren’t just kind of hanging around stewing in your own juices was a big deal. Buffy knew what it was like by now to just have to sit around feeling useless while your urges ate away at you; especially when it wasn’t that you couldn’t use those urges, but that you were choosing not to because you were trying to be better, or live up to some new vision of yourself. And not just for your own sake, but for the sake of a relationship and what it had shown you about yourself. Spike wasn’t the only one doing some reforming. With the big case of peace that had broken out on her hellmouth, some days it took a lot of not-entirely-bloodless kink to satisfy her inner Slayer; otherwise she would probably be banging down doors and looking for reasons to harass otherwise peaceful demons who weren’t doing much wrong, which was just terrible-no-good-bad-cop thinking, but it was also real, something she had to acknowledge inside herself. Demons were adrenaline junkies, and she had as much of a demon-side as Spike did, if more carefully hidden, all wrapped up inside a human burrito. 

Which begged the question, didn’t it? Did sorcerers and witches have a similar drive? Was it, like, a part of them to have to use their magicks, or they got all anxious and flipped out? 

Was that what was driving Willow’s issue right now? Had she gotten a taste for a kind of magicks that made it too hard to stop; like Buffy getting a taste for killing as opposed to just fighting, or…

“Bloody hell. Got to keep an eye out, or the strung out little bints’ll evade us,” Spike muttered, ducking swiftly around a corner. 

Ahead of them, Willow and Amy had evaporated into the shifting shadows of some dank little alley. “Well, thank goodness we have your enhanced vampire sniffer.”

Spike grunted truculently in reply, but didn’t otherwise qualify his ability to hunt down sneaky witch-junkies. And how weird was it to think of Willow that way?

Eventually they ended up in some area of town way down by the waterfront, sort of equidistant between those former Thurgald warehouses (currently a very extended family of Tintanna were living in them, as far as Buffy could recall the mental demon-map), and that damned dock where she’d ended up having a tearful conversation with Angel over the Judge business, and enjoying a nice fight at Faith’s side at one point as well, before everything had gone tits up senior year. 

Faith recognized it too. She was tense as hell, off to one side. “What’s up?” Graham whispered. 

“Nothing,” Faith answered, clipped and without inflection. “Just wanna get this over with.”

Graham didn’t push. It was obvious that he could tell it wasn’t nothing, and just as obvious that he knew when not to start anything. 

“They’re heading that way,” Tara hissed, pointing up between two warehouses, where a fairly large open space existed, set up to allow for the loading of trucks and containers. 

The group followed at minimum safe distance… and watched in amazement as their quarry rippled… and flat-out vanished right before their eyes. 

“Hell,” Spike muttered. “That feels bloody powerful. Dunno how I’ve missed it.”

“It feels  _ awful _ ,” Tara qualified, horror crawling through her voice. “How can they stand touching it?”

“It feels pretty standard, actually, for that sort of thing,” Anya put in with a shrug. “No doubt you’d be able to get in, Tara, and Giles, and Ethan, but I’m not sure about Buffy and Spike. Xander might manage it…”

Xander blinked. “What?”

“Never mind, honey. We’ll talk later.”

“Uh, okay?”

“I would prefer not to go in,” Anya went on, businesslike as ever. “I have good relations with the local demon community at this point, and would prefer to keep said relations intact. I will, of course, be willing to act as rearguard, and if you happen to need me on the way out for any minor assistance, I’ll be ready, but…”

They had plenty of volunteers. Anya was in no way required to join them. “I’m not letting it keep me out,” Buffy answered, tugging out her invisible sword, courtesy of Rayne’s little finger-trick. He had since used it on pretty much every one of their weapons, with a nice alteration that allowed it to be turned off and on at will. “If Willow’s in there being used by some creep, I’m getting her out of there. Spike and I need to have words with this… person.”

“May as well get it over with, then,” Rayne said, and to Buffy’s shock, he strode forward, right into the ripply spot, and disappeared himself. 

“Oh, bloody hell,” Giles muttered, and sped up to follow his boyfriend into the whatever-it-was.

“Crap,” Buffy agreed. “C’mon,” she called to the group behind her, and dove in to follow. Whoever wanted to come along could come.

Apparently whoever had made this pocket-dimension or whatever it was was relying on the glamor to keep people out—that and the whole ‘always in motion’ clause—instead of depending too much on any kind of ‘if you have power’ deal. Or, at least, it didn’t seem to be working too hard to keep Buffy out. That, or her miniscule demoninity worked for her, because nothing turned hard or bounced back at her to cast her out or anything. Instead what happened was that the second Buffy crossed the invisible boundary, she found herself slithering through some kind of chilly thing that felt like she was walking through an adult-sized, slimy, wet soap-bubble; like she had been shoved into a very nasty, funhouse-mirror version of some clown’s show in the park, but on a terrible-no-good-very-bad day instead of a nice, sunny one, and instead of being filled with summer air, the bubble was filled with gross Nickelodeon slime, nastiness, and foul-evil effluvium.

Without warning, she came out the other side and found herself stumbling into a space that looked… Well, really a lot like that one godawful vampire drug-den Spike had shown to her.

She was in some sort of waiting room type-place. There were a few chairs and stuff, in varying stages of disrepair; bare, wooden walls exfoliating old finish here and there in little curls; an uncovered bulb hanging down to shed light on the shabby contents of the room and its inhabitants. Right now those included Rayne, Giles, and an incredibly skinny person who reeked of BO, sitting on one of the seats with his head in his hands, his elbows between his knees, moaning about needing ‘just a little bump, please, just one, I just need a little bump…’ 

Spike appeared behind her almost immediately, of course. He was followed by Faith, Xander, then Tara. 

Graham didn’t come through. Interesting. He went everywhere with Faith. Maybe he couldn’t get through? Which possibly meant interesting things about Xander, that he had gotten in, but Buffy would think about that later. “Alright. What’s the plan? Where’re the girls?”

“Oh Goddess,” Tara murmured, and now  _ her _ head was in her hands. “It’s  _ awful _ in here, how can she  _ stand _ it?”

Rayne’s lips were set in a flat, uncompromising line. “Let me handle this, if you will, young woman.” And before Buffy could even get out the words that came to mind—something along the lines of, ‘Oh  _ hell _ no, why would I let  _ you _ , of all people, handle this, are you out of your  _ mind? _ ’—he had turned and was marching toward the only other door in the room. 

The second his hand touched the knob, the guy moaning over on the seat jumped up. “No  _ way _ man, it’s  _ my _ turn next, I’ve been waiting for three  _ hours _ , those two bitches already jumped in ahead of me, there’s no  _ way _ …”

Rayne turned on the junkie, flicked his hand idly. The other guy stumbled backward to fall back into his seat, mouth open in awe. “B…b…but…” he stuttered. Rayne had already turned away and was opening the door while he was still gathering up the energy to shout, “But, Rack said I was next! He  _ said… _ ”

Rayne ignored him to shove through the inside door.

Unsure what else to do, Buffy followed him, the rest of the crew in her wake. And saw horror. 

The inside room of this awful place was decorated like some kind of weird wannabe den or something. It had burgundy curtains hanging down over scarred walls with peeling, ivory paint, as if by their presence they could make the place look upscale. Lamps in sconces shedding light over weird, impressionist paintings, which… Well, despite a lifetime’s exposure to art, all Buffy really got from most of them, at a glance, was ‘large’. The center of the room was graced with a low, octagonal table, completely surrounded by embroidered pillows. There were more, kind of scattered all over the place on the floor in little islands; in the corners, against the curtained spots, like someone was inviting people to lay around all over the place after something really strenuous. 

Standing in the middle of the room, looming over one of the piles, was a tall guy in an unbuttoned, smock-like khaki shirt over a gray beater, wearing a necklace that looked like it had an arrowhead on it. He didn’t even glance over at their sudden entry, his eyes fixed on his own ceiling, like a freak, and… Okay; his eyes were weird. One seemed… different than the other, and they were both oddly clear-looking, like there was almost nothing in there. 

He also had a serious scar all up the right side of his face, totally crossing over his right eye. Like, how had he not lost that eye? Though, it kinda explained why that one was not-okay-looking. 

He had heavy lines around his too-wide mouth, and was all heavy-lidded, and his broad-shouldered build suggested that he was not to be messed with. Everything about him suggested a kind of humming menace, though some of that was belied by the straggling hair, the strange features, the odd behavior.

Buffy glanced down at the huddled bundle at his feet, and, /Oh./ Amy was on the floor, sprawled over the pillows and smiling slackly, her eyes entirely black from coronas to pupils. She was laughing quietly to herself in some drunken way. She looked debauched and half-crazed, and the roots of her reddish-blonde hair were black, like she’d tried some kind of Halloween home-tint-gone-wrong. Tearing her eyes away, Buffy cased the rest of the room, but Willow was nowhere to be seen. Though, judging from the way Amy was all blissed out, and the way this guy was standing over her, Giles’ boyfriend was probably right. /Oh my god, this is like a suckhouse for witches, isn’t it?/

Rayne didn’t even pause to take in the room. He just marched right up to the man, who was still studiously ignoring them. He had one hand held out, palm pointed at the guy like he was going to smack him in the chest or something, though he halted a few inches shy. “What a sorry, sad sack you are, aren’t you?”

The stringy-haired man finally shifted his gaze downward to eye Rayne, looking vaguely amused by his entrance.  _ “Hello _ , there. Aren’t  _ you _ tasty.” His eyes flicked to the rest of the group, fanned out now behind them. “And you’ve brought so many delectable people with you; like party favors.” A faint twitch of discontent touched his lips briefly. “You’ve also brought the Slayer and her pet vampire, but we’ll let that slide. I’ll deal with them easily enough; but first thing’s first.” And his fingers lifted, as if to caress the air around Rayne’s face. “I can almost taste you from here. Like bayberry and musk, and a touch of cinnamon…” His nostrils flared as he drew in a deep breath, and his heavy-looking eyelids fluttered closed. “And a hint of sandalwood…”

To one side of Buffy, Giles made a pained noise that sounded like he’d been punched in the gut.

“I can feel you as well,” Rayne informed the warlock flatly. “It’s obvious you have no one to back you. Not one god or sponsor. All you have is what you steal.”

“…Maybe a touch of frankincense…” 

“Which means I’ll easily destroy you, and anger no one.”

The skanky dude with the scar began to laugh. “You’re strong, obviously. But with who I’ve had today, you’ll never…”

“Oh, try me,” Rayne interrupted, and man, his eyes were intense. “It’s one thing, feeding off idiots like the one out there. But filling the girl up with it? She’s a mere child!”

“Oh,  _ that _ one,” creepy dealer-guy answered, and now he was staring at Rayne with a strange hunger. He sounded as self-assured as anyone Buffy had ever seen, and had she thought Rayne was skanky? This guy was  _ disgusting _ . “She came running to me. My strawberry… She’ll come back to me again and again, till she’s empty as a husk. And, I think, so will you…”

“I rather think not,” Giles answered, stepping forward, and Buffy thought she’d never seen or heard her Watcher sound or look so hard as he pushed to the head of the line.

Creepy warlock-dude’s head jerked around to face Giles.  _ “Oh,” _ he answered, looking Giles up and down. “We have another contender.” And then, grossly, he  _ hummed,  _ sounding like he was lusting. “Mmmm. You’re a treat too, aren’t you? So much wildness kept under wraps. Knowledge and discipline, with all that  _ longing _ underneath; incense and history and that  _ feeling _ …” He cocked that long-haired head, looking like he was seeking for just the right words. “Of…”

“A distant, powerful wind, blowing freely over wide, ancient fields,” Rayne broke in. “And you’ll  _ never _ taste him. Or the boy. Or the Earth-witch. Or the girl up there,  _ ever _ again. You’re  _ done _ .” 

/Up there?/

Buffy had no time to do a single thing to call off this standoff before Rayne was lifting his hand once more; before he spoke one word.  _ “Ligare!”* _

“You dare…” 

The warlock cut off as something bright burst out of Rayne’s hand to explode against his chest. Spectacularly, he slammed backward, seven feet or so, to smack hard up against the closest wall; hard enough that one of the paintings came loose to slither down. It banged him on the back of the head en route to the floor, and oh, wow, Ethan Rayne could be downright  _ dangerous!  _ Not with his fists, obviously, since Giles almost always took him out just by, like, pulling his hair or whatever…

/Well, based on more recent events, maybe all that was kind of more of a kink, or some kind of reward, but still. More magicks-mojo guy than fighty-guy./ But when it came to the former… Stay out of the way, much?

It was probably a good thing he was sorta-kinda on their side now.

Still sprawled on her nest of pillows, Amy started to shriek. Weirdly, she was echoed from above. And out of nowhere, Willow fell, like it was raining witches, to thump to the filthy oriental rug at their feet.

“Oh, Goddess,” Tara cried out, and ran to her girlfriend to turn her over.

She was recognizably Willow… and yet she was not. Her eyes were black and staring, and her hair… Her hair was streaked with black too, and her face was all… veiny-looking, and… And also, what had she been doing on the  _ ceiling? _

“Oh my God,  _ Wil _ …” Xander muttered, and moved to kneel by his bestie, across from Tara.

Over there across the room, the creepy dude who’d gotten Willow so high was currently grappling with Rayne. They were spinning around the room throwing crazy magicks bombs at each other, like they were having a duel or something, which, just, woah. Giles was ducking, Amy was still shrieking from her corner, Willow was quaking in Tara and Xander’s arms like she was having some kind of overdose seizure or withdrawal symptoms or something; and what the heck should the rest of them do? Should they try to get in the middle of the fight, or…

“Ripper!”

And then Giles had his hand in Rayne’s again, and Rayne had his free hand extended… 

He shouted that one Latin-sounding word again… and once more the warlock was pinned to the far wall; this time to be held spread-eagled by the power of whatever Giles and Ethan Rayne brought to the table when they worked together. Even Tara’s attention had been torn briefly away from Willow’s dire straits by the fight and was staring now. “Oh!” she exclaimed, and then something that looked like recognition flooded her being. “Oh. I didn’t know,” she whispered.

“Appreciate it,” Rayne gasped, nodding slightly at Giles. “He’s holding everything he could take from her before I broke the connection. He took the hell of a lot from her. Your girl’s… quite powerful.”

“So I’d noticed,” Giles answered, wincing. “Good bloody thing you are as well.”

Rayne bared his teeth, sounding pained. “Not enough at the moment, I’m afraid. He’d also had the other young woman; and if she’s no great shakes compared to your girl, she’s still not inadequate.” A faint grimace in Giles’ direction, one that still somehow managed to look affectionate. “Lucky thing I have you put by to bolster me.”

Buffy jerked her head to Spike and Faith and made to move closer with them fanning out to either side of her. If the freak got away from them… Best to be ready.

“Flatterer,” Giles was saying. He accordioned up against his guy, sighed heavily… and folded their fingers together to keep their connection intact. “What on Earth ought we to do with him, do you think? He’s likely to just go back to what he’s been doing, if we let him go. He knows no other way to get his own high in place, and clearly he’s addicted by now.”

Rayne looked as if he no longer cared all that much, now he’d done what he’d come to do. “It’s your Slayer’s town. Ask her and her vampire… Oh, shut it,” he interrupted himself rancorously as the black-eyed warlock struggled against the wall. 

Apparently this Rack person took issue with the idea of being judge-and-juried by the Masters of Sunnydale. Which… Buffy was still kind of amazed that, A, Rayne had jumped in like that, all selflessly, and B, that he was now just all ready to turn his quarry over to them. Like… if his motivation had actually been selfish in some way, like it had been with Doc, then why would he give the guy to them? But if it hadn’t been, then why would he bother? Did he really care that much about Willow? And if so, why? Because Giles cared? Or was all that talk about seeing himself in her really enough? Or…

Buffy’s head was whirling too much right now to even remotely process any of this. So she did what she always did in moments like this. She stuck to action, moving closer as Rayne glanced over his shoulder at them. 

Giles, still linked to him one-handed, did the same. “Buffy, Spike, what do you think?”

Spike shrugged. “Think we ought to kill him, myself,” he answered bluntly.

Buffy didn’t even bother to stare at her vampire, much less pretend at shock. Aside from the fact that this was, by this point, pretty standard vampirical justice by his lights, really, she could see his point. Someone like this, if chased out of town and told never to return, would just go do the same horrible thing in someone else’s jurisdiction, which… /He’s human, but can you really call him that when he’s doing something this supernatural? Are people this tuned into Dark Magicks and stuff really human anymore? Which… Does that put them under my jurisdiction? I mean, regular human justice can’t take care of them. He’d get out of jail, and there’re no laws for this, but technically I don’t have jurisdiction over him either, since he’s human, so does he just fall between the cracks?/

She shot a glance at Faith, feeling lost.

Faith shrugged, looking like she was trying hard not to look as troubled as she felt. “Hell. Blondie’s got a point, B. I’m not big on killing humans, after… You know. But what the hell are we gonna do with him?”

/Ugh./ The problem was, Slayers just weren’t equipped to deal with ‘human-but-with-powers’. /The last time I got in a mess like this, I broke Ted, and spent however long thinking I’d killed a guy. Which, when Faith killed that dude after… God. I  _ felt  _ that, for a sec. I really need to remember how lucky I was that I ended up not in the boat she was in! But this guy…/

How could they just, like, kill a human in cold blood for screwing up, to keep him from doing it again? Buffy was seriously starting to question the part of her job where she had a three strikes rule for demons, which… 

How could they live with it if they did it to a human? /Because we’re just not built that way, is the thing./ On the other hand, she didn’t think she was really built to let him go to wreak exactly this kind of havoc again, with someone else’s loved ones, in some other town, and… There had to be some kind of system, some kind of  _ jurisdiction _ for this sort of gray area, right? Some supernatural… /Oh!/ “Giles, does the Council have people who take care of guys like this?”

Giles’ answer was immediate, if now showing the signs of strain. “If you want to know the truth, this is honestly what wetworks teams are actually for, Buffy. You send them out, armed with a witch or a competent spellcaster of other ilk, and they mop up. But since we haven’t…” 

“Call them. See if they have any operatives in the area. They can handle this guy. It’s their job, right? And until then, I guess maybe we’ll have to find a way to keep him under wraps.” Buffy turned her gaze on Rayne. “Is there any spell that could, I dunno… drain his energy down or keep him trapped or something till they come? So he can’t get away or hurt anyone?”

Rayne regarded her with glittering interest, his free hand still trained on the struggling warlock. “There are a few, if you’re willing to use some of his sort of medicine against him.”

The question lay plain before her. She had a chaos magician sort of nominally in her ranks now; one who had no trouble doing a few dark things here and there if the situation warranted. She could color outside the lines enough to make use of him, if she trusted him enough to do so. 

More importantly, did she think it was okay to play that much of a gray-area game with a guy like him? And was it fair of her to ask that of someone who was trying to reform, however minimally?

Well, really, that was the question to ask him, so she might as well do it and get it over with. “Are you willing to do that, in this case?” she put the question out there, quiet and without weight.

Rayne watched her for a brief moment, head tilted slightly, then his eyes glanced over to Giles. Some sort of conversation appeared to take place between them, utterly soundless, before he nodded slowly. “Considering the alternative, I’d think that’s the best option.”

“Alright,” Buffy answered. “Then we’ll keep him in the back room of the Magic Box till they get here. Giles, make the call.” 

Giles looked troubled. “I’m going to have to keep in contact with Ethan until we…”

“Oh. Alright, then I will. What’s the number?”

In the end she had to prize his phone out of his pocket, which was a little weird, fumbling around in Giles’ pants. But really, they were just lucky they had managed to convince Mr. Technophobe here to get a cell phone at all. It had taken serious work from everyone in his life—both business partners, Buffy, Spike, Wil, everyone who ever remotely had to get in touch with him—to guilt him into getting one. (Well, that, and the inference that maybe if he’d had one, they could have warned him about the hellmouth-wide sexapalooza before he’d fallen into its grasp and spent three days incommunicado, but that was mostly because teasing Giles about anything remotely related to sex was like shooting fish in a barrel.) 

Luckily, his having the phone on hand meant that he also had the right number on speed-dial. Buffy shot an apologetic glance at Faith before she hit ‘send’, got a shrug in response, and kept her eyes on Spike after that, regret for the necessity foremost. Her vampire took her decision phlegmatically, eyes darting between their captive and his two keepers and Wil, still on the floor between Tara and Xan. 

‘Yes?’ a crisp, anonymous British voice answered the call on the first ring.

“Hi. This is Buffy Summers, in Sunnydale. I don’t know where you guys are stationed, but we need you to come up here and do your jobs. We have a warlock up here who’s been using all the local magicks-users to give himself a high, and getting them all hooked in the process of draining them all dry. If you could come cart him off to wherever you put offenders like that, we’d be super happy, since it would free us up to concentrate on the whole chasing down our missing hellgod part of our day…”

There was a silence at the other end of the line. When the voice kicked back in, it was very businesslike. ‘How powerful would you say this… person is?’

“Well, I have my Watcher and another very strong magicks-user on him right now, and they’ve got everything they have trained on him. They’re talking spells to drain him or lock him up till you get here, because he just pumped up and drained my friend, who’s apparently also incredibly strong, along with a friend of hers who’s also a natural witch, so I think it kind of varies depending on whose power he’s sucked up that day.”

Another digesting sort of pause, then, ‘It’ll take us a day to get a team armed with the appropriate personnel and en route, but rest assured we will begin within the hour, Miss Summers.’

“I appreciate it.”

The call ended as swiftly as it had begun. Buffy pursed her lips as she closed it. “So, either the lower echelons just automatically jump into gear when things fall into their rubric, or Quentin Travers was serious about the whole, ‘let’s do the new version of things’ agreement…”

“Oh, he doesn’t want to make you or your mother angry,” Giles muttered, then glanced over his shoulder, sounding a little like he was gritting his teeth. “Do you think we can get this rather alarming person into a car and back to the shop, before our strength wears out? I’d like to find the right spell to reduce and bind him as swiftly as possible.”

“Oh, come now, Ripper. Effort is its own reward, yes?” Rayne sounded a little breathless, but also strangely energized. 

Giles narrowed his eyes at his guy. “You’re going to be flat on your back after this, Ethan.”

The aside earned Giles a smirky look. “Yes, well, I’ve been in worse positions.”

Faith snorted and bent to help Xan and Tara lift a very limp, freaked-looking Willow to her feet. “Let’s get the hell out of here. It’s been a bitch of a day and a half, and this place stinks.”

Buffy made a face and turned to Spike. “I guess that means we have to get Amy.”

Spike flashed a little fang. “Don’t suppose I get to bite the little slag?”

“She might be tainted or something,” Buffy pointed out, in lieu of a flat no.

Spike rolled his eyes. “Probably bloody well worth it,” he answered, but moved of his own accord to join her in picking up the wreck of a witch.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Boom de yadda.  
  
 _ligare_ = tie, bind  
  
Alrighty, then; we'll pick this up next week with further junkie entertainment. At which point I'll be at the end of my 'padding', and I'll pray I'll have found a way to write more in the interim, considering I'm catching up from a dead computer and... let's just say I'm hoping i have a cold. *fingers crossed*  



	43. Chapter 43

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So incredibly sorry this took so long! RL has been attacking all at once. Luckily my new computer-like-object is working out, at least (ish. it calls itself a 'tablet', but really it's a v smol laptop with some sort of detachable screen... and a wildly sensitive touchpad that keeps doing random things I didn't ask for, wth). I guess that's in vogue now? (My old self finds it v odd, but it works!) and it does the going online (!!!) and the typing (tell y'all what. That stretch of trying to work /post from my phone with a bluetooth keyboard? I know there are peeps who do it all from the phones. They give homage to other gods than I do. I need a whole-ass computer with a larger screen than that, yo). 
> 
> Not that everyone needs to hear about my computer triumphs and woes, but I find this all labyrinthine and weird after years of using my old dinosaur of an HP AMD whatever laptop (may she RIP. She was a good ol girl, and produced well over 4.5m words of fic and dozens of manips for me, and deserves a good sendoff!!!) 
> 
> Anyhoo, all this to say, I may actually get to my (now massive) backlog of comments one of these days, now, once I've caught up on my (seriously worrisome) dearth of fic to give to y'all! But in the meantime... the ongoing adventures of the amended Scoobies!

With the help of a stoic-as-ever Anya and an unnerved-looking Graham, they got the nasty warlock stabilized and bundled out into Giles’ car. Anya volunteered to drive it for them, Xander giving up his spot at her shotgun so that Giles and Rayne could sit, hands still linked over the top of the seats, with Rayne in back practically hovering over this Rack guy. The former's eyes glittered as he held his hand and his magicks over the latter all the way back to the shop. “Going to need you lot to prepare… some sort of incarceration for him, once we arrive,” their pocket chaos magician informed them, through gritted teeth, as the rest of the group bundled into Spike’s slightly more spacious ride.

“We have that Aurberge’en Crystal downstairs,” Anya answered brightly, and turned the BMW over. “Xander, when you get to the store, go down into the basement and find a bright, silvery crystal in a black box, would you? There’s a good boy.”

Eyes set on Rack and filled with hate, Xander nodded once, sharply, as he helped Tara bundle Wil’s semi-conscious body into the back of the DeSoto. “Got it, Sweetie.”

At a loss for what to do with Amy, they briefly considered leaving the other half-conscious witch behind with a guard, though that thought didn’t sit quite right. Faith said she was down with hanging back to mount a watch. Spike had other ideas, though. Viciously yanking out one of the myriad knobs on his dash, he jogged around his car. At which point he carelessly grabbed up the lolling girl—kind of in the way you’d pick up a bag of garbage—and unceremoniously tossed her into the trunk. “Slag can ride in the boot, for all of me.”

So, there were moments when dating a vamp without a human soul meant his approaches were a bit… rough around the edges. But considering that space was limited…

Faith chuckled as she witnessed Spike’s roughshod solution to the transport issue. “Well, there goes our reason to hang around here.”

Graham shrugged and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. “Squeeze in with them, babe. I’ll jog up. They need you.”

Faith lifted her brows at him, frowning slightly. “You sure, Cowboy?”

“Yeah. Gotta get ready for my PT test anyway.” He shot her a way-too-charming grin and turned away, back toward Main. “I’ll grab my car on the way. Left it at that empty store.”

“Okay. See you when you get there.” 

He nodded and promptly vanished around the corner of a building, going at a disciplined, military clip.

Faith watched him disappear before shrugging and jumping onto the back of Giles’ car, next to Rayne's prey. “He acts up, I’ll break his neck for you,” she offered blandly, and flipped a stake into her hand; probably for something to play with to hide her anxiety over dealing with human quarry. Not that Buffy blamed her. After what happened down on those docks over there…

Buffy tried hard, most of the time, not to remember how she had felt back when she’d thought she’d killed Ted. When the cops had…

She definitely remembered. Finding out that, in the end, he wasn’t human, didn’t alter her experience of that moment of utter, horrified, empty-bellied terror. To have it go on and on without end, and no roboticized relief…

Faith probably thought Buffy’d gotten off way easy with the Ted thing, if she’d ever heard about it. /Like she probably thinks I do with everything./

“I’d be much obliged,” Rayne was answering, sounding slightly breathless. “He’s a lot to handle, considering he badly wants to break loose of my hold and drain me.”

“Sounds more and more like a vamp the more we hear about him.” Still twirling her stake, Faith nodded at Anya. “Let’s go, chica, before the Brit-boys wear out.”

“Right.” The BMW peeled out, heading back toward the Magic Box.

Spike slipped into the driver’s seat of the DeSoto and glanced over at Buffy as he pulled the door shut. His expression, the feel of him, all read as ‘very pissed off’. “Need to go hammer the hell out of something, Slayer,” he informed her as he put the car in gear. 

Nodding, she ducked in and pulled her own door shut. “Okay,” she answered him softly, and laid a hand over his on the shifter. “Soon.” 

She definitely got it. 

Back at the Magic Box, Giles and Rayne, with Anya’s help, were already wrestling the baddie up against a post back in the workout room—which, okay, ask a Slayer if she wanted to sacrifice her dojo, much?—and trying to secure him with some bonds Anya was spelling to make them magickal, using some book which was apparently good for that kind of thing. “Which one…” Anya murmured, flipping pages.

“‘Trammel and Bind’,” Rayne gasped, pushing hard against one of Rack’s shoulders while Giles pushed the other. Their hands were still linked. “It’s right after ‘Glamors and Thrall’…”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Buffy announced. “Faith.” And she moved behind the pillar to grab one shoulder. These guys should be helping Anya with finding the right spell, not trying to hold this guy down.

Faith nodded, shoved her stake in her belt loop, and joined her to do some manual restraining. 

Under their hands, the struggling warlock felt weirdly chilly, but also like he had some kind of raging inferno going on just beneath the surface of his skin. It was weird. It was like something was actually moving there; just beneath the envelope of him. Something independent. Something slithery and strange and… 

“Got it! I think!” Xander came bursting out of the doorway to the basement to round the corner into the open dojo, holding a box above his head. “The Auber…whatever crystal…”

“Perfect,” Anya informed him and nodded a spot right in front of their struggling captive, equidistant between him and the two guys currently holding him magickally bound. “Okay,” she went on as Xander set the box down, very gingerly, just in front of Rack and backed away. “So, if this is the right one, I’m bespelling the bonds to hold him and all his currently-contained magickal force behind…”

“Yes, precisely,” Rayne cut in. “If you would, please, young woman…”

“I like that!” Anya announced, sounding irritated. “I’m over a thousand years old, not some infantile, experimenting child, like these two idiots who…”

“Anya,” Giles interrupted the incipient rant firmly, but his voice was now shaking. “We are losing hold of a creature who has, at this point, absorbed the magics of two very strong, instinctive, natural-born witches, on top of who knows how many other paltry local magicks-users today. Please, if you will, bind him so that we do not inadvertently release him to take us all out in the process of escaping to wreak havoc all over town?”

“Oh. Right. Well, here goes…  _ “Obligate hunc hominem potentiamque eius per vim vinculorum _ _! I mandatum est!”* _

The bonds hanging loose from ol’ Rack’s wrists flew up all the sudden to wrap around his body, slithering like snakes. They crossed around him several times, snugging him up tight against the post and squishing his arms down to his sides… and then glowed for a brief moment, so incandescent that Buffy’s eyes acquired a very weird afterimage for a while. ‘Man in Shoelace on Post, 2001’. 

Buffy wasn’t sure if she should let him go, as Rack hissed, his skin now visibly writhing as whatever lay beneath it fought impotently to escape him, and was trapped there, just beneath the surface, like foul potential energy. “I will destroy all of you. I will suck the marrow of your bones, and leach every ounce of power you’ve ever felt from you to fill me to the brim. I will…”

With a low, breathy exhale that sounded like relief, Giles dropped his free hand. After a second’s experimental hovering he turned and lifted a questioning brow at Rayne. 

Rayne nodded and dropped his own hand. And when Giles’ hand fell away from their clasped grip, he lifted that one to rub at his brow. “Well,” he husked. “That was… strenuous.” 

Oh, wow. His whole palm was red, and he had nail-marks around the edges of his hand, Giles had dug in so hard.

Giles’ hand, too, was reddened, and bore some of the same marks as he lifted it shakily to remove his glasses, pressed his knuckles to the inside of his nose for a minute. Then, “Ah, Anya, would you locate the page that mentions charging a stone for the absorption of energies? It should be somewhere after charging a stone for the powering of a rite…” God, his voice sounded weary. Like, on the verge of exhaustion, weary.

“Absorption…” Anya murmured, flipping pages.

The doorbell jingled as Graham stepped into the store. He could be heard closing the building up quietly behind him, and his measured strides rang through the place as he passed where Tara had Wil laid out on the floor out there, anxious and uncertain of her fate. “How, uh, is it going?” he asked softly.

“Not sure yet,” Tara replied, audibly afraid from where she squatted next to her unconscious girlfriend.

Buffy frowned and considered ripping off one of Rack’s arms. It wouldn’t necessarily kill him, but it would make her feel better.

“What about… uh, the other girl? Amy?”

Spike spoke up for the first time at this. “Still in my car. She can detox there for the rest of time, for all of me.” As he said it, a burst of his irritation hit Buffy broadside, washing through her, and...

/Oh, crap./ Buffy had honestly completely forgotten that Amy was in the trunk of the DeSoto. That wasn’t good. That was, like, a kidnapper move, and she should go out there and at least drag the idiot girl out of there, or…  
  
Also, man; she hadn't realized Spike was still so pissed. He'd been keeping it really well under wraps.

“Found it! Absorption. Do you want me to…”

“Yes, please… if you would… be so kind. We are both… weakening rapidly… I’m afraid…”

“Better move out of the way,” Anya murmured, flickering a quick glance at Buffy and Faith. She was already moving to set the book down in front of the crystal.

Faith shrugged as she let go of the shoulder she’d held. Turning, she headed toward the doorway, to lean against it and look out toward the antics in the main space. “Still trying to figure out how to get the guy safe for transport,” she informed Graham in businesslike tones. “Right now, not so cuddly.” 

Buffy kept her eyes on the spellwork at hand, and worked to let Spike’s pique—okay, rage, a lot of it at her—fade out of mind for the moment. They had had it out over his questionable moral weirdness before, and they would again, and it wouldn’t change anything between them, but right now they needed to deal with this sitch before they could cope with personal stuff. She certainly couldn't let it derail her focus till the current crisis was averted.

Anya was looking about as alarmed as she ever did. Which, still didn’t escalate much past mildly offended as she nodded and squinted a little at the fairly enormous crystal Xander had located and and set in front of Rack. “Tedrush,” she announced, hand passing over the stone’s pointy bits, and glanced back at the book lying next to it on the floor. _“Alucavigalindarium. Tedrush, galindarivarinum.”_

/How the hell do they  _ pronounce _ this stuff?/

The restrained warlock began to struggle again, though his eyes remained rolled back in his head. Anya ignored him to continue her chanting, while the two men holding him fast with magicks looked about ready to collapse; teeth bared now, arms trembling, obviously at the end of their mutual strength. The cords of Rayne’s forearms were showing below his rolled-up shirtsleeves. Giles was sweating copiously, his glasses foggy with it. 

Luckily, the crystal was beginning to glow, there in its spot on the floor. Anya, still keeping up with her low chant, frowned at it. “He’s resisting. Which I get, but…” She glanced over her shoulder at Giles and Ethan. “Do you two have anything left?”

Giles looked wiped. Like, seriously wiped. He opened his mouth, but his hands were still shaking. Before he could speak, he was forestalled by a hand to his shoulder. “It would be quite unwise,” Rayne interrupted, “for us to contribute further. Perhaps it would be best if you phoned the house, got the two young men to come by; and perhaps the young woman in there…”

“I’ll call,” Buffy bit off briskly, and raised her cell phone. “They won’t say no to me, no matter how freaked Andrew is. Spike,” she insisted without looking at him, “will you give them a ride over?”

He didn’t answer. Just turned on his heel and made to exit the building. 

Yep. It was going to be bad tonight. But… he was hers… and this guy was messing up his town. And, it was Wil. 

He would make sure they came, no matter what. She could count on that.

“Uh, before he, um, leaves…” Graham’s voice broke into the wash of low murmurings. “Doesn’t he still have the other girl in the trunk?”

“Yes,” Rayne agreed, sounding as if they were discussing the price of linens or something. “There is that, of course. The ongoing question of… what to do with the young woman who… is currently still languishing in the boot… of that rather lovely vintage vehicle…”

/Oh. Crap. Right./ Buffy had, once again, completely forgotten about Amy. Jeez. There was just too much going on, and what the holy heck were they going to do with, and about, her? She was just trouble, with how she seemed ready to influence Willow into the badness all the time… And yet, she was also a victim of this Rack guy, and of her own mother, before all this. She probably really hadn’t had much of a chance to turn her life around after all that crap; having the food locked up, and living on a broth diet and god knew what else her mom had done to her. But, like… /She still coulda made different choices than she did lately./ 

Right now, in this moment, broth-diets and evil mothers aside, Buffy was having a tough time caring about what happened to Amy in the current moment. After all, life had just been simpler when she’d been a rat, before she’d come back as a person and made everything to all kerflooey for Wil and Tara, and, just… “Yeah, I guess we should bring her out too. And, I dunno, tie her up or something, and maybe take away her magickal abilities, too, at least briefly, till we can figure out how to…” /What? What can we even  _ do _ with her?/

It sucked, because tying her up and stuff just seemed like victimizing her again, making things worse, but at the same time, if they couldn’t trust her not to do something terrible… /There’s, like, no right answer here./

Graham broke in again, out of nowhere, sounding all frowny and confused, maybe even a touch disapproving. “Look. I know this isn’t my show, and I know the girl got your friend into some bad shit, but I have a coupla friends right now who are junkies because of that… whatever it was they had us on downstairs, you know? And it wasn’t our fault, what they did to us. I’m thinking it was like that for her. She was born this way, right? Able to do this magic-stuff? And then she probably ran into this guy as a stupid high-schooler, and he offered her a way to do more, faster—because that’s how dealers work, right? They catch dumb kids and get ‘em hooked when they’re too young and stupid to know better…”

Buffy winced at this all-too-normalizing description. It was just so weird to think of this Rack guy and his crack-house-o-magicks as the same kind of thing as the guy they were always telling you to avoid at school, who hung around outside the fence with crack in his pocket, trying to get kids hooked so he’d always have clientele needing another hit for finals week. And considering the kind of fears Amy would have had, after living with her mother... /She would have wanted to make sure she was never helpless again. When all that stuff started going down with MOO.../

“…So, yeah. She got hooked. If she wasn’t a rat or whatever, she’d already be dead by now. But she was, so she’s been having withdrawals since then. So of course she ran straight back to him the minute she could; because she never had a what-do-you-call-it. A bottom. It was all good for her, so of course she’s gonna tell her friend. She needed a pick-me-up after being a rat for however long—which, don’t get me started on that. I can barely wrap my brain around the idea that a person can be a _rat_ for years, but it musta been a hell of a thing to deal with—and then all the sudden, dealing with being human again?” He shook his head, disbelief warring with horror on his open, handsome features. “Look; if I was used to getting high to cope, that’d be my first stop too. I know I’d at least get wasted.” He shrugged then. “So, you know; she did. And she brought her friend. I don’t think she intended it to get so bad.”

Well, crap. Mr. Voice-of-Reason here had just neatly punctured all their ability to blame Amy for getting Willow onto ‘the bad path’ or whatever, because, dammit, he was right. From Amy’s perspective… /She couldn’t ‘know better by now’, could she? She’s not twenty like us. She’s still, mentally, at least, a stupid high-schooler, experimenting with what she thinks is, like, the witchy version of keggers and pot. Oh, man…/

She’d probably had no idea how bad it could get down there. Not till it was already too late. With her self-esteem already so low because of what her mother had done to her all those years, she was probably just super gratified any time the guy told her she ‘tasted’ good or whatever. /Which ew, but…/ And by bringing someone as gifted as Willow to that guy, she’d accidentally signed them both over to permanent junkie bondage. “Spike,” Buffy sighed, turning away from the skanky dude on the floor. “We need to take care of both of ‘em. If not, we’re creating a worse problem for ourselves later. And you and I both know we don’t need that.”

Over there by the front door where he’d halted, hand up and ready to be out, Spike was not having it. Buffy could feel his rebellion. His rage. He’d stationed himself there, between the two spaces, to be prepared in case he was needed in either room; to fight Rack with them, or to help with Wil if Tara needed him.   
  
H elping Amy come down was not remotely a part of his mental equation. She was not one of Buffy’s people, so she was not on his mental reservation, and deserved no special consideration. 

Dammit, he was going to fight her on this one. He definitely wasn’t going to like it that she was going to insist on it. And, damn, dammit, she really didn’t want to have to use her leverage over him with something this relatively unimportant… but that was only one level. On another…

/I need to find some way around this, without it totally screwing up my relationship. Because right now, it’s almost there. And, like, over  _ Amy? _ But also, human girl with bad luck and a bad friend-chooser, which, not cool, much?/

Wincing internally, Buffy sought Giles’ eyes. “Is there some kind of… I dunno, magicks detox or anything? Someone who helps people deal with this kind of stuff?” /Anything that we can do where this can be not my problem and Spike’s? Because I could really use an excuse to make this not a thing my relationship breaks over./

Giles, still focused on the monumental task of keeping their captive under control, exhaled heavily. “That sort of thing… tends only to work… if the person is willing, Buffy. It works on… essentially the same principle as… a twelve-step program… or a court-ordered sobriety group, or one of those self-hypnosis classes. If the mind is… not willing to accept… the new programming…” He sounded like he was talking through gritted teeth.

“Go on and bring her in,” Rayne answered, eyes still focused on the stymied warlock, if his words were addressed to Spike. “I can scare her straight.” His voice, though strained, was flat and certain. “She’ll be ready for… whatever local coven wants to teach her the… standard nonsense—the Threefold Law and ‘an’ it harm none’ and… all the rest of that rot—once I’ve shown her what’s at the… end of the road she’s chosen.”

Despite the serious business of keeping Rack under wraps, Giles briefly flickered his gaze away from the sitch there to look askance at his partner. He wasn’t the only one. “No offense meant, Ethan… but for all you sound serious about it… your verbiage doesn’t exactly sound… convincing as regards to… counseling her in another direction.”

Rayne’s set expression didn’t alter. “I found my own way, and that isn’t it. I can see… however, why it would work for a girl like her. She’s enough power… to get herself into trouble; enough to be used. Not enough to extricate herself. She’s in a catch22. Best if she functions… with a few rails put round her.” His eyes flickered very briefly away from Rack to touch on Spike. “I’ll take responsibility for her.”

“Fine,” Spike answered curtly, and wrenched the door open, the bell tinkling cheerily over his head as he marched out.

His impotent frustration surged over the bond like floodwaters, and eee, this was not a good night for him. 

“I’ll give you a hand,” Graham offered, and followed him out before the door could slam shut.

/Double-eee./ Hopefully Spike would be able to restrain himself, and not bite Faith’s overly-helpful golden retriever of a boyfriend before they came back in, since at best all he’d be doing was holding the trunk open.

They reappeared in seconds, Spike carrying a bound Amy over his shoulder. The minute he was inside the store, he tossed her unceremoniously to the ground, like she was a sack of potatoes. “I’m off to get the rest of the slayerettes,” he announced, and was out again before Buffy could even issue any words that might count as a peace offering. 

/Shitshitshit. It’s gonna be a bad, bad night in couple-land./

Graham, who had winced when Amy hit the floor, picked her up again. “Sorry about that, Amy,” he informed her as he slung her over his shoulder. “Tensions are running high. You understand.” His eyes sought Faith. “Maybe best if we keep her off in the storage room, Faith?”

“Sure, Cowboy.” Stepping back, she held the door for him to cart the half-conscious witch into the little closet off the hall where Anya kept the most recent shipments. There would probably be enough room on the floor in there for Amy. Good enough for keeping tabs on one half-conscious girl; at least for the nonce. 

With a heavy sigh, Buffy caught Faith's eye as they exited back into the main space. “Great. Faith, you and Graham keep an eye on her, will you? You know, away from Wil and... all that?” And she waved her hand toward the insane spellwork in the offing in the training room, as she wasn't sure what sort of effect all that might have on either one of the damaged girls. It was the main reason Wil was being kept in the main shop space; or so she assumed, anyway.

“Can do, B.” 

Buffy turned her attention to the rest of the room. “Tara. When the boys get in here, we’re gonna need you.”

Tara was silent for a sec, then, “I don’t wanna leave her, Buffy.”

They didn’t have time to tussle over it. “It’ll just be for a second. But we need to get him bound, so he doesn't hurt anyone else. You know it and I know it.” Giles was petering out fast, and without him, Rayne wasn’t going to be able to hold the guy on his own.

More silence, then a small, reluctant, “Okay.” 

Back behind her in the training room, Anya was still trying her chant on her own, steady and uninflected; as if she were reading a recipe from  _ Betty Crocker’s Cookbook,  _ because nothing whatsoever could fluster that girl. _“Tedrush. Gorindum-varinanrium…”_ Whatever she was doing seemed to be at least helping the two older magicks-workers to hold their own against him, which was awesome. They clearly needed all the help they could get by this point, judging by their teeth-bared, fixed, and sweating expressions.

Luckily the DeSoto came roaring back fairly quickly. Spike didn’t reenter the store, choosing to stay outside and smoke or whatever. Which, Buffy thought was probably a good choice on his part right now, considering the level of growing ire she could feel on the bond. 

From where he was standing, it would be easier than what he would no doubt classify as ‘all this froofaraw’, to just drain this guy and have done with it. And was it bad that Buffy was, in a very, very tiny corner of her mind, a teeny-tiny bit tempted to just let him? It would certainly simplify matters.

But that was the kind of wild-west judgment they were trying to get away from, here, A; and B, it was the sort of thing the Council thought she was going toward. It was what they feared from her, considering her ‘alliance’ with the undead. She had to go with the better angels of her nature in order to prove them wrong, or they might just look for some loophole in their new contract with her and Faith, and renege. 

The boys came in slowly, looking wary as they sidled through the door to the back room. Andrew took one look at Rack, pinned up against his pillar, made an ‘Eep!’ noise, and tried to withdraw, like a scared turtle. 

Jonathan gave him a shove. “Oh jeez. Stop it!” he insisted, and took another step into the training space. “You heard Spike. Mr. Giles and Mr. Rayne need us. Anya’s trying to help him hold this guy all on their own, and he’s holding all the power he could drain from Amy  _ and _ Willow. That’s a lot. So we’re gonna go over there, and we’re gonna boost them, and we’re not gonna run this time, okay? Because we’re part of the white hats now, and that means doing the right thing, even when it’s terrifying.”

“I never said I wanted to be part of the white hats!” Andrew protested, almost stammering as Jonathan gave him a push toward the center of the room. “You just came and got me and dragged me into their little club! I never even had a choice…”

“Well, it was that or become Buffy’s enemy, and you don’t want that. I promise you. Yesterday, flying monkeys. Tomorrow, she has you on the Plinth of Judgment with all eyes upon you, and you’re being sentenced to a thousand years in the Phantom Zone. So just deal. We bat for the good guys now; or at least, you better if you don’t wanna end up like Zod. Or not even Zod, but, like, one of his butt-boys.”

Andrew frowned uncertainly as he was pushed into the limelight, neared the glowy crystal. “Yeah, but General Zod had some really great armor, and those neat, flowy robes—at least, in the Golden Age, anyway—and he had some really cool sidekicks…”

Jonathan gave his shoulders a shove. Stumbling, he collapsed on the ground next to the crystal, landing in a cross-legged position. Moving around to the other side of Anya, Jonathan settled himself in and nodded to her. Both boys did their level best to avoid looking at the skanky warlock being held in a failing magickal stasis to one side of them and less than a foot away. “What’s the chant?” Jonathan asked, eyes on Anya’s bland expression.

“About time you got here,” she informed them, then nodded and held out her hands. They took hers. “Tara!” she called through the door.

Wincing, Tara released Willow’s limp hand and made to rise. Buffy moved to crouch next to her, took the hand as it dropped. “I’ve got her till you get back,” she informed her gentle friend, and patted her on the arm. 

Nodding, Tara moved swiftly around to make up the fourth side of the small circle. Buffy could just barely see them all, where she had herself stationed over by the big wooden magazine rack. It seemed a good vantage from which to watch through the dojo door and still keep an eye on Willow. From where she'd positioned herself, it looked like Tara just barely fit in between the crystal and their prisoner’s writhing form. 

Buffy didn’t envy her the placement, with that creeper at her back. Tara didn’t look like she was much enjoying it either; but Anya, it seemed, had to face the guy to maintain her position as focus for the group. She herself only had a few inches of space between the tall, now-smoky-looking pillar of quartz and the toes of Ethan Rayne’s patent leather shoes as she took up the chant once more. _“Tedrush, alucavigalindarium. Tedrush, galindarivarinum. Tedrush, gorindum-varinanrium…”_

As if the language she was speaking actually meant something to them, the boys took up the chant almost immediately, which was… wow. Tara was a little slower to join, frowning and stumbling a little over the strange words. By the second time around, she had it though, and the crystal went from glowing to turning to a strange version of incandescent that only made sense if you imagined a light burning brightly inside of a smoky, fractured, iridescent set of funhouse mirrors. Refracting over and over again as it built into a crescendo of flame, it got brighter and brighter, building a sort of dark conflagration… and on the last, shouted, _“TEDRUSH!”_ something almost visibly sucked right out of the warlock, Rack. Buffy barely caught it; like an afterimage on the edges of vision. 

The spent creature against the post went into convulsions, howling like a madman with his bound body arced outward toward the crystal. His cry sounded utterly bereft… and the dark orbs of his eyes drained abruptly, leaving behind one milky cornea and one wildly swiveling, regular-colored one in a face filled with hate.

And then, abruptly, his body sagged. “You  _ can’t _ …” he moaned, sounding horrified. “You can’t! That’s  _ mine!” _

Rayne had finally lowered his hand, and for the first time since they had left the druggie magicks house, the muscles in it no longer looked taut and tense. “It absolutely was not. It was stolen.” His tones sounded like an exhale of relief as he straightened slightly. “Excellent work, young people.” And with a quick nod to Giles that was little more than a flicker of an eyebrow, he announced _ , “Eum ligare!”* _

“You  _ bastard!” _ Rack groaned, convulsing again. And then he fell backward to the floor of the shop, legs wound together and arms tied to his sides by ropes that now wound entirely around his form, rather than to the post that had once held him upright.

“Wow!” Andrew announced, sounding awed. “We actually did it!”

“Finally,” Anya answered, and closed the book with a snap. “That took forever.” Standing, she dusted off her skirts. “What a terrible bore. And look at this  _ mess!” _ She flapped a disgusted hand at the tall mineral between them, now swirling and pulsing threateningly. “No way we can sell that crystal now, with all that dark energy crammed into it…”

“I’ll put in an order for a replacement,” Jonathan answered, coming to his own feet and holding out an absent hand for Tara, who looked floored by the entire thing.

Giles’ hand had dropped the instant Rack was no longer an immediate threat. While the warlock was still writhing around on the floor and the younger people were busy self-congratulating, he sagged, turned, and promptly staggered out of the room to find the nearest chair, over by the circular table. “Good Lord, that was difficult to maintain.” Prizing a handkerchief from his pocket, he mopped at his forehead, tugged off his glasses, polished them, then lowered his face briefly into his palm. “Not sure when I’ve ever been more exhausted…”

“Exorcising Eyghon was more difficult by far, as I recall,” Rayne pointed out, following in his wake to throw himself into a nearby chair. He looked just about as fatigued. 

Giles threw Rayne a weary look, loaded with sarcasm. “Please, don’t remind me of that. Not right now, if you will.”

“Right. Well…” Rayne’s eyes turned to Buffy, who had moved back over to squat by Willow’s still-somnolent form. He looked like he thought she was going to have answers to his questions. “What shall we do with our captive, do you think, young woman? Tie him to a toilet somewhere and feed him once a day until your pet wetworks persons arrive?”

Buffy made a face and took up her friend’s limp, unconscious hand. “Ugh. I am so not cut out to be a jailor. Isn’t there some way to, like, make it so he can’t suck people’s energy out anymore? You guys said he really doesn’t have any power of his own, right?”

Rayne lifted his head slightly to cast her a shrewd look. “Oh, that would be quite the most terrible punishment he could possibly imagine, Slayer. I should think that if we managed to find a way to do that to him—to geld him, in effect—no doubt within a month he’ll have committed suicide, Council or no Council.”

Buffy flinched at this stark appraisal of the situation. “Well, ew. I don’t want that on my conscience either.”

Rayne shrugged it off, clearly uninterested any longer in Rack’s future, or lack thereof. “The man’s as addicted as his victims. It wouldn’t be your fault. All we’d be doing would be protecting others from his future depredations. Because, believe you me; someone like him? Not going to stop.” 

Buffy opened her mouth, though what she was going to say was a tossup. She was interrupted by Giles. What he said, in measured tones, haunted her. “Ethan is quite right, Buffy. Some people are bound and determined to be the instrument of their own doom, and there is not one blessed thing you can do to save them. All you can do is protect others from the fallout.” Sighing, he replaced his glasses, looking weary but resolute. “I believe the suggested course of action is the best one, as it carries the outcome with the least possible likelihood of further destruction.” He blew out a weighty sigh. "No doubt it's what the Council's representatives will do, at any rate, once they have him."

Buffy set Wil’s hand down and rose to her feet, shaken. /Oh, wow./ Who knew that Giles could be so nihilistic? So resigned to death and destruction?

“Honestly, it might be kinder to simply give him to your vampire and have done with it,” Rayne pointed out, shocking Buffy. “Give him a swifter end. Nothing for your wetworks fellows to bother with, even,” he added with a faint smirk for Giles. “Could just tell the lot of them to toddle on home; maybe with a quick note for some of your mates, or any of your family who are still extant. ‘Doing well, thanks. Have taken up the magicks again, but otherwise fine, ta for now.’”

Giles actually blushed slightly. He also, no shit, rolled his eyes dramatically. “Oh, Ethan, do shut up. Yes, they’ll learn from this lot that we’re together, and no, I don’t give a damn if they do, so you can ruddy well stop fishing about it…”

Buffy was still hung up on the last thing; the thing that had been embedded right in the middle of that amazing little side-diatribe. “Wait, hold up. You think I should just… That Spike…” For Rayne to suggest it was one thing. But Giles’ utter lack of shock at the suggestion was currently blowing her mind. 

She didn’t have to ask if Spike had overheard that part of the conversation. The door was cracked, and even from here she could feel-hear his low, subterranean growl of agreement-rage-hunger, which… Mark that off as another situation she would have to deal with later. /You guys are really not remotely helping this situation right now, okay?/

“Oh, good Lord, Ethan…” Giles muttered, and off came the glasses again, so he could pinch the bridge of his nose. “Please don’t contribute to others’ relationship difficulties in your quest to try to score one off on me.”

Wow. Everyone was being super testy with everyone else tonight. Tara and Wil were clearly on the outs, Giles and Rayne were sniping at each other, and she and Spike were… 

Well, let it just be said that there was stuff to discuss. About the only couples around here right now who were holding up fine were Faith and Graham and Xan and Anya, which… well, probably those guys were all due for some good times. /Just, why did the wheel of fortune have to land on us losing a turn tonight so those guys could get the vacation to Maui?/

Graham stuck his head out of the hallway, as if to put an exclamation point on the situation. “Uh, this Amy girl’s waking up, if anyone wants to put some mojo on her…”

“Uh… I got it,” Jonathan spoke up into the exhausted silence. “I can handle that much.”

“Oooh, let me help!” Andrew jumped in, coming to his feet. “If being one of the white hats means I can do more magicks, but just I have to tie up the right people, then I’m down!”

Okay, now he was getting enthusiastic about the wrong things, only for the right side this time. Did this guy even have an off-button?

“Don’t sound so excited about binding people, Andrew, or they’re gonna worry about you, okay?”

“Uh, okay, because they didn’t all just do a bunch of big binding spells…”

Jonathan led the way to the small inside door, sounding all bland. “Yeah, but they didn’t get off on it…”

“Says who?”

“Just come on. And let me lead. You’re getting way too excited about this.”

“Okay, but when Lex Luthor put the krypto-bonds around Superman, and then used the pink kryptonite to…” His excited voice faded as they drifted down the hall.

A few minutes later, Graham poked his head out again and gave them a thumbs up. “Situation normal. Or, you know, however normal this stuff gets. Which…” He glanced around the room, shrugged. “Permission to freak out a little, now, Slayer?”

Buffy sighed and glanced down at Willow’s still-knocked-out features. Tara was back and sitting cross-legged next to her now, holding fast to her hand, and it was starting to worry Buffy how long it was taking her to wake up. “Just keep it over there,” she answered softly. /We have enough going on right now. Like, dammit, I have a very pissed off vampire to deal with, whose vibe is seriously screwing up my head, for one. Wil, for another, and, just… God./ She felt like she was buzzing inside, his ire was so strong, out there. He was dying to kill something; the urge so powerful she could taste it in the back of her throat, oh, man…

“This is all just so freakin’ weird. Beggin’ your pardon, all y’all with the ability.”

“You’re tellin’ me,” Xander broke in. “I mean, look. I’ve been around this stuff for years, and I still really just don’t get magicks. I mean, I get that it works, but deep inside I still really just don’t  _ get _ it, you know?” 

Stepping a little further into the room, Graham shook his head and nudged one of the books scattered over the floor with a booted toe. “I feel you. Sometimes I think I’m in a movie. I can get behind the super-powerful chicks. That’s just hot.” Behind him, lounging in the doorway, Faith smirked. “But this ‘use the force’ stuff…”

Xander grinned back at him, clearly pleased at the backup. “Yeah; and they make it look so easy.” He picked up a book at random from the table, glanced into it. “Like, who just opens a book, says  _ ‘Librum incendere’, _ and expects…” 

Despite the overall weariness in the room, nearly everyone jumped when the book in his hands promptly burst into flames. Xander jumped the highest, and slapped the book closed, hard enough to stifle the incipient bonfire. “What the…”

Giles, head down on one arm and muffled by the table, spoke without lifting his head or sounding the slightest bit surprised. “Xander, don’t speak Latin in front of the books.”

Head back over the top of his chair, Rayne chuckled, though he sounded equally exhausted.

“Does that, um, work for everybody?” Graham asked anxiously. “Like, does every one of those… special books let you do, um…”

“Not everybody,” Anya answered, patting a still-gaping Xander on the back. “Not everyone’s a Willow, of course, but most people who grow up in places like this have at least a tiny aptitude. Mostly on the level that I had as a human. Which wasn’t enormous, but enough of course, to get the job done with a lot of help and props…”

“Wait. Hold up; just a darn second. I have an  _ aptitude?” _ Xander demanded.

“Yeah. He has an aptitude?” Buffy felt nearly as thrown as Xander must at this shocker.

“Well, of  _ course _ you do, Sweetie,” Anya answered without remotely glancing at Buffy. “Not everyone can catch the amorous attentions of so many demons. Not to mention the way you instinctively bend every spell put on you. Love-spells, will-be-done spells… Each time, the natural overgrowth of the hellmouth is altered around you to create a bubble-effect which aids in keeping you somewhat insulated from the overall, sometimes damaging culminations…”

_ “Excuse _ me? How did…”

“And, there is the fact that you can see through certain spells and glamors…”

“I can  _ what _ , now?”

“You notice things others don’t see. You see past things others are spelled not to notice. It’s very subtle, honey, but it’s definitely a sign of magickal ability.”

Xander gaped at his girlfriend. “I… Uh…”

Buffy was right there with him. Honestly, she couldn’t remotely deal with this tonight. Xander was supposed to be the freaking normal one! But here were Anya and, like, even Giles, acting like they weren’t the remotest bit surprised to see him do magicks-stuff right in front of god and everybody… And Ethan Rayne was practically amused by all their shock. 

She just couldn’t. “Right. Okay, moving on. We need to mount watches. Round the clock. On them both.” She would skip ahead to the pertinent stuff. That was all she could cope with right now. “Two on two, till the wetworks guys get here. One magicks-user and someone with muscle. Rack stays bound. The magicks-user stays back, so he can’t siphon energy off of them.” She turned to Giles and his boyfriend. “You two. Go home and get some sleep so you can take a shift tomorrow without dying or something…”

“It’s unnecessary to exaggerate, Buffy,” Giles murmured; but he did it without remotely lifting his head from the table. His words were addressed to the floor, and his forehead remained pressed to his shirt-cuff.

“Uhuh. Do I need to get Graham to carry you guys to your car? Or, like get Anya and Xander to drive you home?”

Ethan, head still tilted back on his chair, smiled in a very instigate-y way. “What do you think, my dear? Do you trust me with that cock-on-wheels of yours? I imagine I can safely navigate us back to your flat, should you allow me behind the wheel…”

Giles groaned, but did not demur. 

“I’ll get us back there, Slayer.” Rayne sounded very sure of himself, despite his apparent exhaustion.

“Good,” Buffy answered shortly, and left it at that. “Who’s up to taking the first shift with the prisoners?”

Tara shot her a pleading look, which she got. Wil was a mess, probably needed some caregiving of some kind. Heck, the fact that she wasn’t up yet… Tara would want to be there when she did wake. Not to mention, who knew what state she’d be in when that happened? Which left… “Andrew? Jonathan? Anya just took point in that binding spell thing, so I think…”

Jonathan straightened. “I’ll stay.”

He was a good guy. He’d come a long way, for sure. He was a team player. 

Faith shrugged and tossed something toward Graham. It looked like a lighter, or a coin or something. “I’m up.” 

Graham shot her a concerned look as he caught whatever-it-was. “You haven’t slept in a dog’s age, Faith.”

She blew it off with a look. “No one here has. I’ll live.”

Still frowning, Graham checked his watch. “I’m off shift for another twenty-four. Tell you what. I’ll sleep for six, come and relieve you. You crash out here for a while so you don’t feel like you’re bailing, ‘cause I know you and you won’t sleep if you go too far, and then…” 

Buffy shook her head. “By then I’ll be back. I need to go have a talk with my vampire, and then I’ll relieve both of you. I’ll drag Andrew back here or something.”

Anya reached out and caught a still-poleaxed Xander by the collar. “That’s our cue to head home and get some sleep. I’ll come back tomorrow to help them keep an eye on this person who’s trying to reduce my active clientele, while you go to work.”

Xander frowned worriedly, but nodded. “That okay, Buff? You’re good with us leaving to crash for a few?”

Buffy nodded. “Get Giles and Rayne out of here intact, and maybe follow them till they get back so they don’t crash, will you?”

“I would say I very much beg your pardon, young woman, but in this particular instance you might be wise to suggest such precautions.” With a low groan, Rayne pushed himself to his feet and held out a hand for Giles. “Come, Ripper. A flat surface beckons.”

Giles made a longing sort of noise, which turned into something like the sound a stepped-on frog made as it died, as he let himself be pulled to his feet by his paramour. They made their way toward the front door in Xander and Anya’s wake, sort of weaving into one another’s shoulders as they stutter-stepped through the room. 

Buffy turned to Tara, moved to crouch across from her. “I’ll get Wil. We’ll give you two a ride home.”

“Thank you,” Tara whispered, and there were tracks of tears visible on her face, that Buffy hadn’t had the time or bandwidth to see before now. 

/Oh, man./ 

Glancing up, Buffy caught Faith’s eye, a question there. An ‘are you alright with this?’ look.

Faith shot her a tight grin. “Oh, I’m way too amped to sleep right now, B. After that little party? Get out of here and settle Blondie down before he kills too many people. See you on the flipside.”

“Thank you,” Buffy answered quietly, and lifted a limp Willow to set her over her shoulder. “I’ll be back after a little sleep." /Considering how things look with Spike, probably only about four hours, after some serious  _ talking _ , but, you know./

Once they’d gained the door, it became clear that Spike had been listening to the proceedings from without. He did not speak as they emerged, but immediately tossed his partially-smoked cigarette to the ground and moved to the DeSoto without comment to open the rear driver’s side door for her. Held it for her to shove Wil in while Tara, climbing in the back from the passenger side, tugged her in by her shoulders and settled in to lift her head into her lap. She eyed them both anxiously, apparently reading their auras or whatever as they headed to their customary seats in silence.

Buffy remained mum as he started up the car; as he drove them up to the east side of Campus Row… and he waited in the car while she tugged Wil out and carried her up for Tara, laid her on their bed, gave the worried girl a swift hug and turned to leave. “I’m sure she’ll be okay after she sleeps it off,” Buffy told her friend, and prayed she was right. 

“Yeah,” Tara answered, her voice bearing the resurgent hints of a frightened stutter as she said it.

Buffy was on her way out when Tara caught her at the door. “Buffy?”

Buffy turned back, hand on the knob and waiting.

“I’m… the last person to say… I mean… It’s not about good and bad. It’s about needs and nature. He’s… suffering, right now. Remember that it’s not…” She swallowed. “H…he… Everything he does is for you. His aura’s rioting right now. You could lose… a lot if…”

Buffy stilled, nodded, looking out through the window she could see through the dorm room door. “I know it. Thank you, Tara.”

Tara nodded, looking down into her hands where she sat on the edge of the bed next to Willow’s still feet.

Buffy closed the door and headed back down the hall. And, once outside, she drew close to where Spike stood next to the car, smoking, a dark form holding a dark object with a glowing tip, in the dark of night. God, she was exhausted, and normally he was her haven, her relief… but right now he was another thing she needed to see to, to face down, and that was so counterintuitive to the normal processes of their lives that she found herself at a loss as to how to approach this entire damned mess. 

She needed to deal with this, though, and best not to leave it one second longer. So she kicked herself back into motion, moved to him in the night. Drew even with him, lifted her arms to slide her hands up over his shoulders. “Hey. Look at me.”

He looked away instead. And he was shaking. “Want to drain someone, Buffy,” he grated tightly. “Probably best not to touch me right now.”

/Damn, dammit./ “I know. Will it… help to go fight something? Or…” Shit, it probably wouldn’t. No stopgap would, right now. He’d held back so long; against his instincts, for her sake, and… “I want to give you what you need. I do. I know what I’m asking. I know it’s not fair. I don’t know how to fix this. And… it’s not just the Slayer thing. It’s… The Council, watching us, and the demons, and us trying to be… what did you call it? More democratic, and…”

His cigarette vanished as he  _ crushed it out in his hand, _ the fucking idiot. As a bloom of rage exploded between them, so vast it could have been hers. It was his, but it was so massive she couldn’t tell the emotions from her own. “When we’re  _ patrolling _ , Buffy,” he snarled, “we kill on sight. When it’s  _ demons _ . But now, when it’s a  _ human _ transgressing every one of our laws—draining innocents, using them over and over till they’re dead, to enrich himself—all the sudden we’re pulling out all the bloody stops not to slice off his fucking head for him? How is that not a double fucking standard?”

“Oh,” she heard herself answer, stunned, because she had never quite seen it that way. All she heard in her own head was, ‘I don’t kill humans. I kill demons. For humans, there’s another law.’ She had thought that calling those wetworks jerks was such a good compromise. But now, seeing it from his perspective… “I just… I thought I was doing the right thing. Because they’d say… If I let you…”

“Because he’s fucking  _ human _ ,” Spike repeated, and he was livid. He was utterly livid; at  _ her _ . 

“Not… just…” It felt like such a blow, to be confronted like this. “Not just because…”

“We’re a sodding  _ team _ ,” he battered at her, and god, he was so  _ angry _ . “You take on what I can’t, and I take on what you can’t, and we work the town  _ together! _ Except now, all the bloody sudden, when it’s something you’re too squeamish to handle because it’s a fucking human doing wrong, you need to back the fuck off and call the gimps from the soddin’ Council to take the git off our hands, because why not invite ‘em back into our business and let ‘em know we can’t handle our own, directly after we’ve told ‘em to fuck off, because we said we didn’t need ‘em. So now they’ll think we’re weak…”

“They’ll think we’re  _ moral,” _ Buffy whispered, struggling to stay afloat as her own reasons slowly drowned in the quagmire. “Do you think I  _ want _ those assholes anywhere near us? But this is a magicks thing, and…”

“If you’d just let me drain the fucker, it’d be  _ over!” _ His eyes were blazing at her now, like he’d half like to drain her, and oh, god… “He broke the soddin’ rules, Buffy, same as any vamp in town! He victimized humans! It shouldn’t bloody well matter  _ what _ he is! He’s a supernatural being, human or no, with supernatural powers, who’s…”

“But… It’s like the suckhouse, isn’t it?” she asked, shaking, but certain of this one codicil. She clung to it as she faced him. “They go there willingly, and get the high, and so does he, and they could die from it, but he’s not…”

He froze then, and closed his eyes as if she’d punched him right in the gut. “Fuck, Buffy,” he hissed, “that’s not bloody fair.”

She reached out, caught his hand. “The very first thing I thought of when I went into that place was that it reminded me of that place you showed me. And you let that keep going. And really, the only reason we stopped  _ him _ from doing what he was doing was because he was hurting someone we call friend; or else, heck… we’d probably never even know about it, much less bother to stop him, right?”

“Fuck,” Spike repeated, sounding pained... and abruptly sagged in defeat. “Damn you, Slayer.”

She wanted to cry. Somehow, impossibly, she’d defused his overwhelming rage. She hadn’t thought… “I’m so sorry. I’m so,  _ so _ sorry. I wish it was easier. I wish all of it was easier. I wish  _ any _ of it was easier. I wish _ I  _ was easier…”

His left arm was wrapped around her before she could speak further, dragging her in close to bury her face in his throat. And, his right banded tight around her torso to pull her hard against him so that she could barely breathe. Her hair was all caught up around his forearm, and he was trembling so hard against her that she couldn’t tell where her shaking ended and his began. And his cheek was pressed to her head… and she felt a cool tear slide down along her temple, to drip to her ear. “Oh, Christ, pet, oh, love,  _ please _ don’t say that. I’m so bloody sorry, as well. I know I’m not easy either. I’m a prickly fucking sod of a bastard to put up with, and I bleedin’ well know it, and why you bother is beyond me, but…”

She reached up, clung to his arm. “Don’t. Just, please. Just… Can we not? Can we just… hold each other? Today was…” She really, honestly  _ couldn’t _ .

“Yeah,” he breathed. “Yeah. Let’s go home and just be. This whole day was shite.”

So they got back in the car, and held hands hard enough that both their knuckles went white, and their nails almost drew blood, and went home to the crypt, and wove together so tightly on the bed that there was barely space to breathe except to breathe in each other, and fought to find the way back to some semblance of a reality where everything might feel alright again.

And when they woke, they were the same; woven together, but strained and uncertain. And when they returned to the scene of the crime to take their shifts, they were grim, but they were reinvested. And if Spike was taciturn when the wetworks guys came and took Rack with them, he held it together long enough to see the bastards gone with their quarry. She knew he’d have liked to drain them, as well, push come to shove, but he also knew how hard she’d worked to get onto an even keel with the Council. His loyalty to her was strong enough to keep his mouth shut around ‘the tossers’, though his restraint took its toll. 

Patrol was a little rough for a while after that. He picked not a few fights that might have been unnecessary. And, technically they were good with each other, but Spike seemed to be going through some kind of internal debate or something, because things were… uneasy between them for a while. 

He spent a lot of nights sleeping at the crypt lately, rather than at the house or the dorm with her, which was… worrisome. Like he was having a tough time ‘being human’. It wasn’t the best sitch. 

Things were not so great between Wil and Tara, either. Wil finally woke up after being out for close to twenty-four hours, but she wasn’t herself so much, after the whole Rack thing, and seemed way upset that he was no longer available to give her cheap highs. She also kept asking where Amy was, like they were just the bestest of besties these days; like all she wanted to do was go out and look for new ways to get off on magicks. She seemed to have no interest anymore in school, in the kinder, gentler magicks she did with Tara, before. In anything, really, that she’d enjoyed previous to the whole dark magicks rush. She pretended, but it was obvious that she was totally lying.

Tara and Buffy spent a lot of time commiserating together at the dorm, shaky and trying not to cry; Tara over descriptions of Willow’s pendulum act, swinging back and forth from sincere promises not to do any more magicks, to sneaking around behind her back to steal stuff from Tara’s carefully hidden supplies and running off somewhere on campus to do spells ‘just for a little, quick pick-me-up, it’s nothing bad, I swear!’ 

“She  _ stole _ from me,” Tara sobbed into her hands, sounding at rock bottom. “She lies all the time. She’s always sneaking off somewhere. I have to hide the magicks stuff. The entire room is completely empty, but she…” A shuddering breath. “I mean, it’s not like she can’t steal stuff from the store if she really wants it, you know? Jonathan wouldn’t stop her if she tried. He’s too scared of her. She just has to go when Mr. Giles or Anya aren’t there… And, you know, we can’t keep her away from Amy forever…”

“Yeah,” Buffy whispered, at a loss for what to do with her friend, who was acting so… junkie-ish. It was just so  _ weird _ . And who knew what would happen with the Amy thing. Ethan Rayne had pulled the other girl aside after she’d come to, given her some kind of stern talking to… and then apparently shown her some kind of, like, magickal movie of something that had scared her shitless, or so it seemed from the way the girl had started screaming, eyes bugging out at something only she could see. She’d been a gibbering wreck for a day or so after whatever Rayne had shown her, begging to be allowed to have a new chance to start over, promising she’d never go to Rack again, yadda and et cetera. 

Not that she could. 

They’d turned her over to the local ‘Love and Light’-style coven for some rehab, and according to Giles, she was doing pretty okay. The problem being, they couldn’t send Wil to the same group, being as she was in no way ready to clean up like Amy was. /I kinda wish Rayne would show her the same movie or whatever, by now./ “I don’t get it, you know?” Buffy murmured, still so damned confused by the whole thing. “I mean, I get that she’s been way into magicks for a while now, but it’s like you’re asking her to give up, I dunno; her identity or something. Which is weird for me, because a year ago she was only sort of into this, and she was way more into, like, hacking and being a junior Watcher than…”

Something she’d said seemed to hit Tara like a brick. “Yeah,” she whispered back, and her eyes went distant. “Yeah, she used to really be into other stuff. Other stuff that helped her to feel good about herself, without…” And she frowned thoughtfully, her tears slowing. 

“Tara, what…”

“Oh, nothing.” Tara had that look about her, now; the one that said she was seriously considering a thought, or even a plan. “Just have an idea. But I need to think about it more. In the meantime…” Her eyes zeroed in on Buffy, serious and full of that comforting, good-friend vibe of hers that she always had. The one Buffy believed, because Tara was like the most understanding person in the entire universe. “How are things, lately? You know… with Spike?”

/Oh, God…/ Looking into her hands, Buffy shrugged sadly. “Right now? I kinda have no idea. We’re barely talking.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Yeah.” /And I have no idea how we got here, and I just don’t get it, and I don’t know what the hell to do./ Spike felt so remote from her these days; not cut off, just chock full of demon-y urges she couldn’t seem to tap into, for all her own demon-y side, and just… /How do we fix this? What do I _do_ to fix it?/

It was upsetting as hell, because unlike herself and Spike, who just couldn’t seem to get themselves back on an even keel, even with a blood-bond on their side and a whole territory to bind them together, Giles and his boyfriend seemed to be all snuggly again, like their previous tiffing had been no big. /Why is it just me and Spike and Wil and Tara who are having issues? I thought we were all so tight and unassailable!/ 

“Well, I’m sure you two will work it out, Buffy,” Tara informed her staunchly. “I’ve watched you two work out stuff that would wreck anyone else; and let’s be real. Other people have to work out stuff like who sleeps where. You two are different  _ species _ , and you’ve been fine for over a year, now. You’re gonna be okay.”

Her faith was heartening. And anyway, Buffy knew Tara had to be right. It wasn’t like she and Spike even  _ could _ break up, so they had to figure out a way through this. Not that she even really could contemplate a world in which she didn’t have a Spike. There was this deep core of certainty inside her that couldn’t be shaken that said that he was a part of her and he could never go too far away, and that was that. And she knew he felt it too. Which meant, they could give each other the space to deal with whatever this was. /We just have to make sure not to let each other, like, drift too far, so that it becomes too hard to figure out our way back together, is all./ “You’re right.” She lifted her eyes, patted Tara’s hand in firm certitude. “And you and Wil will figure it out too. I know it.”

“Thank you, Buffy,” Tara answered, and looked down at the floor. “I really hope so.” She exhaled, a mournful sound. “I really miss her. I miss my person, you know?”

“I know how that feels.”

“Yeah.” Tara smiled at her a little sadly. “It sucks, huh?”

“Yeah.” Buffy grinned at her friend. “You wanna have a pity party together? I don’t have any homework tonight. You can come over and we can eat ice cream and watch dopey movies or something.”

Tara brightened immeasurably. “I’d love that.”

Buffy really enjoyed Tara’s company, a fact she often forgot when they were all in a group, so in the end it was kind of really nice that she got the chance to hang with the girl _mano a mano_. They curled up on the couch at Revello with their friends Ben and Jerry to watch  _ While You Were Sleeping _ , because it was a great—not to mention, hilarious—movie to watch in the general vicinity of the holidays. They even let Dawn join them for a while, on the firm fine-print that she had to promise to shut up about the family scenes, since those were probably Buffy’s favorite part, above and beyond Sandra Bullock’s growing relationship with Bill Pullman’s semi-amusing character, who always lived in his dark-haired brother’s shadow. 

“I always thought the guy in the apartment is the funniest part,” Dawn put in as they tittered over the stunned boss and his amazed byplay. “He’s just such a guido.”

“He is, kinda,” Tara answered, then glanced around the house. “At this point I’m surprised your mom hasn’t joined us. Bet she likes this one too…”

“She does,” Buffy put in around her mouthful of Cherry Garcia. “But she’s at Brian’s tonight…”

“Ooooooh, Briiiiiiiannnn,” Dawn howled, and rolled her eyes colorfully.

Buffy flicked a tiny piece of dark chocolate at her sister. “Stahp, or I’ll be forced to muzzle you. That’s just terrible. And don’t make Mom self-conscious about dating or I’ll have to kill you, because her dating Brian means I get more time with my guy.”

Dawn shot her a narrow-eyed stare. “Okay, but you two are fighting or something, which, if you don’t figure that out soon I’m gonna have to go interrogate Spike over it…”

/Oh God…/ “Dawn…”

The door burst open before she could warn her nosy sister off from that incredibly bad course of action. “B!” And Faith was on her doorstep, looking alarmed as all hell. 

Buffy came to her feet, already worried before she was even aware of what had gone down. “Great, what happened?”

“Remember crazy zealot knight guy, with the burns?”

“Um, yeah?” What could possibly have gone wrong with armor dude? /He’s in the burn  _ unit _ , right?/ “Dude’s all safely tucked away in the hospital, where he can’t… You know…” She flicked her eyes at an oblivious Dawn.”

“Wrong.” Faith looked a little too wild-eyed for Buffy’s comfort. “Graham’s at the hospital right now. We were doing one of our sweeps when we found him. But not in the burn unit. In the  _ psych _ ward.” 

/Wait, what?/

Faith must’ve read her expression right, because she nodded back, looking seriously concerned. “I’m not shitting you, Buffy. He’s one of  _ them _ now. The crazies with the weird… thing.”

“Oh.” /Shit./

Drusilla had been right. 

Glory was back.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


So... yeah. I'm sorry about how this is going, but... If you're upset with me now, save it up.   
Seriously, though, A, it wasn't my idea, and B, it's been building for a hot minute. _   
_

_ Obligate hunc hominem potentiamque eius per vim vinculorum _ _! I mandatum est! =  _ Bind this man and his power with the strength of the ropes! I command it!

_Eum ligare!_ = bind him!

All the rest is obviously just a bunch of really dorky gibberish I had a lot of fun making up because it's fun coming up with something that looks like its obeying grammar rules on the fly.  
  
As to Xander... I will never buy that it was only Jonathan's superstar spell that made him suddenly have magickal abilities. You have to have something to pump up first for an ability to be pumped up.   
  
And as to Jonathan and Andrew being nerds... Always fun when the 411 from one fandom actually becomes useful in another, hehe.


End file.
